by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night, in between 60 Minutes and Madam Secretary, I put on another Lifetime “premiere” movie (for
some reason they’re doing reruns on Saturdays and have relocated their
“premieres” to Sundays) of a film originally shot under the title Do
Unto Others but ultimately shown with the
preposterous name I Killed My BFF: The Preacher’s Daughter. (They’d done another movie called I
Killed My BFF in 2015.) It was yet another
Lifetime production in which once sensed a bad movie with a good movie trapped
inside it trying to get out — indeed, several good movies trying to get out, which was part of the
problem. The central character is Lily Adler (Megan West), fraternal twin
sister of drug-addled scapegrace Jason Adler (Matthew James Ballinger — the
cutest guy and the best actor in
the movie, which of course means he gets killed about two-fifths of the way
through the running time). Their father (Joel Gretsch) is pastor of a
nondenominational church whose theology is carefully unspecified but seems to
hew much closer to God as fear than God as love, judging from the way he treats
his kids. Their mom offs herself early on by combining alcohol and pills. Lily
seems to be a good girl but has a dark past that included drinking, drugs and
sex — at 16 she lost her virginity to a 27-year-old man who bailed on her as
soon as he knocked her up, and mom arranged for an abortion but never got over
her own guilt feelings about that, which, it’s strongly hinted by writers Danny
Abel and Blake Berris, helped cause her suicide. As the movie opens Jason is
dating — or at least visiting and having a lot of sex with — a woman twice his
age named Rae Chastain (Carly Pope, who’s well cast in the role — she looks like the sort of hot older woman a teenager with
more libido than brains would fall for!), whom we meet when she’s having a wild
party (as wild as Lifetime filmmakers could make it, anyway) involving alcohol,
cocaine and sex. Rae’s daughter Scarlet (Katherine Reis), whom Rae named after The
Scarlet Letter (a tale about adultery
involving a married woman’s affair with a priest), comes home in the middle of
the party, finds her mom and mom’s friends drinking and doing lines of coke,
and a man and a woman fucking in her bedroom. Scarlet is disgusted and walks
out, moving in with her 15-year-old boyfriend Nolan (whom we never see), though
it’s above-board: Nolan is still living with his parents and they’re cool with
the idea of Scarlet staying there as long as she and Nolan sleep in separate
rooms. Jason invites his sister Lily to visit his girlfriend Rae, and Rae
determines to corrupt the good little preacher’s daughter, taking her to a
dance club and feeding her alcohol and pills, leaving her woozy when she wakes
up the next morning and she’s supposed to be leading the youth group at her
dad’s church.
Nonetheless, Lily snaps back to her good side when Jason ends up
dead — he and Rae were out driving in Jason’s truck, Jason demanded a packet of
heroin, Rae said that was one drug even she would never do, and just how Jason meets her demise
and Rae gets injured (from which she ends up with a prescription for pain meds
which she, of course, abuses) isn’t explained until later in the show: Jason
took the smack, then jumped off a bridge, and Rae leaped in after him but too
late to save him. Meanwhile, Scarlet catches her boyfriend Nolan seeing other
girls and moves back in with her mom, only she’s also drawn to Lily’s church —
which, for some reason writers Abel and Berris never bother to explain, pisses
off Rae big-time: she determines to keep her daughter away from Lily, Lily’s
dad and their church. There’s a
total-immersion baptism ceremony for the youth-group members in which Lily is
baptizing Scarlet when a furious Rae shows up, takes her away and announces
that the two are leaving town to get Scarlet away from That Church. The climax occurs at a ceremony dedicating the
church’s new youth center to the memory of Jason and Jason’s mom, and Scarlet
runs away from home to attend — only her mom follows her there and Lily pulls
out Jason’s old gun (which we’d seen Jason playing with in an early scene —
Anton Chekhov strikes again!) and in the middle of the ceremony denounces Rae
as an instrument of the devil whom she has no choice but to get rid of on the
spot. Ultimately Rae gets the gun away from Lily, the two wrestle for it
(Maurine Dallas Watkins strikes again!) and Rae ends up dead — and in the final
scene Lily is shown wearing an orange jumpsuit, leading a Christian group in
women’s prison, while her dad, who apparently lost his church as fallout from
his daughter’s murderous rage, is preaching in a basketball gym.
Lifetime’s
official synopsis claims this story is “inspired by true events,” which makes
one want to research the “true events” and see if they were as dramaturgically
messy as Abel’s and Berris’s fictions; as it is, I Killed My BFF: The
Preacher’s Daughter is full of characters
who are wildly self-contradictory, not because Abel and Berris created people with legitimate dramatic and
moral complexity, but simply because they never really decided who these people
were or what they wanted. The director, Seth Jarrett, does a surprisingly good
job with the mess Abel and Berris gave him, and the acting is quite good —
though Joel Gretsch just seems to be there as the preacher dad (the writers
drop a couple of hints that he’s incestuously attracted to Lily because she
reminds him of her dead mom, though fortunately they don’t go very far into that), West, Pope and Reis all deliver legitimately
powerful performances and do their best to convince us that these are real
people with mixed motives and desires. Quite a few good movies could have been
made of this material, including the relationship between Scarlet and Rae —
given the real-life instances we’ve heard of in which straight-edge kids have
had to deal with drinking and drugging parents, including doing their level
best to save them from their addictions, it’s a wonder Lifetime hasn’t done
more with that as a situation —
and also whether Lily still has any desires towards her old “wild” lifestyle
(though this film follows the tradition of 1930’s exploitation movies like Reefer
Madness in warning viewers away from the demi-monde by making the demi-monde seem simply too boring to bother with) and whether
that creepy, self-righteously “moralistic” dad of hers secretly has an
incestuous itch for her bod. But subtleties like that were pretty much beyond
the level of micro-talents like Seth Jarrett, Danny Abel and Blake Berris!
