by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I got to see the second Lifetime rerun on last night, a film
from 2017 from The Asylum (which actually releases theatrically, though their
theatrical films tend to be quickies attempting to grab the audience for a
public-domain story or plot premise: they rushed out versions of H. G. Wells’ The
War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’
A Princess of Mars just before
major studios released big-budget versions, and other films on their list
include Ghosthunters and The
Fast and the Fierce) called Psycho
Brother-in-Law. An opening credit says this
was inspired by a true story, though as Charles said about the film Shine it’s obvious that if this is a true story, the
filmmakers (director/co-writer José Montesinos and his co-writer, Delondra
Williams) chose it because they could easily shoehorn it into the familiar
Hollywood clichés — in this case, the familiar Lifetime clichés. Set in
Brisbane, California (though filmed in Pacifica), Psycho
Brother-in-Law opens with a prologue in
which young Brisbane High School student Eric Campbell (Marc Herrmann) is about
to be beaten up by a blond bully when his brother David (Mitch McCoy) comes
onto the scene and starts whacking the guy with a baseball bat, and though Eric
tries to warn David off once Eric is out of danger, David continues the assault
and eventually kills the bully. Then we get a typical Lifetime title, “23 Years
Later” — a lot of Lifetime movies
begin with these sorts of prologues but the time jump is rarely as long as 23
years — and 23 years later Eric (Mike Duff) is a rising high-tech executive.
We’re really not sure what he’s doing or why he’s taking so much time doing it
(if Montesinos and Williams had made him an entrepreneur doing a start-up it
would be more believable than if he’s just an employee, even one relatively
high up in his organization), but his long absences from home and his general
exhaustion when he does show up
are getting under the skin of his wife Kay (Brittany Falardeau, top-billed) and
their teenage daughter Laura (Megan Ashley Brown), who’s inherited her dad’s
mathematics skills and is practicing for some sort of school competition in the
subject. David (Zack Gold, who for once in a movie looks enough like the actor cast as his brother that we
can believe they really are brothers), Eric’s younger brother, shows up out of
a clear blue sky one day and says he’s on vacation from a lucrative job
crab-fishing in Alaska. Eric isn’t there when David shows up but Kay
impulsively invites him to stay in their guest room until he’s ready to return
to work. Then the usual incidents of a Lifetime movie start to happen that
indicate David isn’t the charming, genuinely cute guy he seems to be.
When the
two brothers are out drinking in a singularly unconvincing bar set and a fat
guy with a beard (who looks like the director and former All in the
Family actor Rob Reiner really gone to seed) claims Eric jostled him, David
practically starts a fight then and there until Eric is able by the skin of his
teeth to call off his wild brother. When yet another work commitment — of which
there are so many Kay starts wondering if there’s a woman involved in the
“work” situation and Eric is cheating on her, though he insists there isn’t and
it’s clear that, unusually for a husband in a Lifetime movie, we’re supposed to
believe him — causes Eric to break their “date night” and David offers to go on
Kay’s date in her husband’s place, the two have a great time and Kay admits
later she’s starting to develop “feelings” for David even though she’s not
pursuing an affair. Later, however, we learn that David served a four-year term
in a psychiatric hospital for manslaughter after he killed Eric’s assailant
there and he’s been diagnosed as paranoid and potentially violent — and in a
key scene that lets us know just when, how and why he’s going to go off the
rails, Montesinos shows him unscrewing a pill bottle and then closing it again.
Obviously David’s decided to go
off his meds, and the results are predictable: he runs into the fat guy whom he
and Eric had that run-in in the bar several acts earlier and strangles him on
the street — the guy has a gun on him and tries to pull it, but David
overpowers him, gets the gun away and takes it with him after he’s killed the
guy (remember the sacred words of St. Anton Chekhov that when you establish a
pistol in act one, someone has to fire it in act three). Then, when Laura’s
boyfriend Ron (Billy Meade), a wanna-be musician who drives around in a dowdy,
once-hot Pontiac Firebird, drives her home after a date and wants to get more
physical than she does), David comes to Laura’s rescue, pulls her out of Ron’s
car and then beats Ron nearly to death — obviously this is a man who is ferocious and animalistic when
it comes to defending members of his family! Eric and David, who in the
meantime has confessed that he was fired from that crab-fishing job instead of
just taking a layoff from it, go on a male-bonding fishing trip — only David
brings along the gun (ya remember the gun?) and shoots Eric because he’s decided to eliminate his inconvenient
brother and take his place as Kay’s husband and Laura’s dad.
The finale takes
place at Eric’s and Kay’s home, when David comes, holds the two women at
gunpoint and announces that he’s killed Eric and will be taking over as head of
the family — only, natch, there’s been a deus ex machina in the form of another fisherman who was walking
through the woods with his fishing pole whistling (the shot is so much like the opening of the old Andy
Griffith Show on TV one expects him to be
with his son and whistling the TV show’s theme!) when he comes upon Eric,
realizes he’s been shot but is only wounded instead of dead, calls 911 — and
eventually Eric comes to enough to alert the police to what’s going on and tell
them his homicidal maniac brother is threatening his wife and daughter. The cops
duly arrive and tell David to put his gun down and surrender, but instead he
“commits suicide by cop” and lets the police blow him away on the home’s
staircase. Psycho Brother-in-Law
is yet another Lifetime movie whose hackneyed, clichéd situations are at least
partially redeemed by the skill of the participants: Zack Gold turns in a
nicely controlled performance in the title role, managing both the character’s
infectious charm when he’s on his meds and the dangerous craziness that
overtakes him when he isn’t. José Montesinos proves skilled at building
suspense and creating a sense of menace even in pretty ordinary suburban
settings, and overall this is one of Lifetime’s better efforts even though
there’s one major plot hole. In the prologue it looks like David is older than
Eric, but in the main story he’s younger — which led both Charles and I to
expect a plot twist in which it would turn out that way back when it was Eric who killed David’s tormentor (since in the prologue the two brothers
never addressed each other by name) and then framed David to take the blame for
it. For that matter, I also half-expected David to have the hots, not for his
sister-in-law, but for her daughter — one of Laura’s schoolmates even kids her
about being with such a hot guy, and she insists, “He’s my uncle!” — adding incest to Lolita-style injury. Psycho Brother-in-Law also fits with the usual Lifetime trope in that the
genuinely hot guy is the villain; though (as I noted above) Mike Duff and Zack
Gold look enough like each other to be believable as brothers on-screen, Gold,
playing the psycho, is clearly the sexy one!
