by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a Lifetime
“premiere” movie at 8 p.m. last night that was actually surprisingly good. It
was released under the title Cheerleader Nightmare but imdb.com lists it as Teen Drone Stalker and gives Cheerleader Killer as an alternate title, and it’s so new that though
imdb.com lists a director (Danny J. Boyle, not to be confused with the Danny Boyle who made Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire) they don’t credit any writers and they list the
cast members but don’t identify
them with their roles. The leading characters are Sophie White (Taylor Murphy),
a high-school girl with long blonde hair and a disinterest in participating in
the Cleveland High School cheerleading squad even though her mom Paula (Melissa
Ponzio) is the school’s cheerleading coach. (One of the interesting things about
this movie is that it makes being a cheerleader seem like almost as hard work
as being a football player; the teams exercise similarly.) Instead she’s
pursuing photography, and her mom is saying that’s fine but she really needs an
avocation that will teach her how to participate in a team rather than
something she can do on her own. About the only acquaintances she’s made in her
high school are her boyfriend, football team captain Tyler (Johnny Visotcky,
who’s tall, rail-thin and has an oddly angular face reminiscent of the young
John Carradine; he’s O.K.-looking but really isn’t physically credible as a
football player); and Mikey (Jeremy Shada), her partner in the school’s AV lab
where they have access to a red helicopter-like drone that can take photos of
people around the campus and essentially spy on them. The moment we see Jeremy
Shada, with his boyishly cute appearance, we immediately conclude that he’d be a far better match for Sophie than Tyler —
especially since we also see Leah, head of the school’s cheerleading squad,
making a play for Tyler with lines like, “The head cheerleader is supposed to go out with the captain of the football team —
it’s like a law of nature!” We also learn that Tyler’s father is in prison for
armed robbery and that he himself has a couple of minor infractions on his
record, but he’s trying to put all that behind him and help the school win
football games so he can get a scholarship and go to college.
Things heat up
when Leah mysteriously disappears after a wild party; later her body is found
in the woods surrounding the community (the name of the school may be
“Cleveland High” but the locale is a typical affluent suburban bedroom
community, not a major city, and the long
shots representing the houses are some of the most preposterously obvious model
work ever passed off in a movie — as if the director had his 12-year-old son
build them out of balsa wood) and the film basically becomes a whodunit. Sophie
insists that Tyler couldn’t have done it because … well, even though he has a
police record and he’s the son of a criminal, she’s in love with him and she
trusts him. Instead, against the opposition of her mother who thinks that this
will put her at risk, Sophie teams up
with Mikey to investigate the crime herself (interestingly, no official police
officers are ever seen in the film, though we hear a siren indicating their
presence at the end). At first they suspect Riva (Raleigh Cain), who took over
as head cheerleader after Leah’s death and always wanted the job — she even
hung a doll with a noose around its neck in Leah’s locker and attached a note
to it saying, “Your days are numbered” — but when Riva’s ankle bracelet turns
up at the scene of the crime (a staircase at the party house where Leah was
pushed to her death, following which her killer moved the body and dumped it in
the woods) Sophie and Mikey realize that’s too pat a clue and someone stole Riva’s bracelet and
planted it on the scene. Meanwhile, Sophie’s mom Paula is receiving condolences
from Coach Parker (Sean McNabb), who runs the school football team, and where I
thought this was going was that Coach Parker had a crush on the underage Leah
and killed her when she resisted his advances.
Instead [spoiler alert!] Tyler turns out to be the killer after all — he
and his friend Ryan (John-Paul Howard) are seen driving in Ryan’s truck
plotting how to cover up the crime when Mikey spies on them with the drone. At
one point Tyler and Ryan hijack the drone and use it to spy on Sophie, figuring
that if they can’t pin the crime on Riva they’ll make Sophie the fall girl, but
what they don’t realize is that Mikey has a master connection on his computer
and all the video the drone records goes to an account on the “cloud” where
Mikey can access it all. He had previously used this feature to document that
Tyler and Leah were having an affair behind Sophie’s back — which
understandably turns Sophie against Tyler, though she still can’t believe he’s
a killer — and he recovers the data stolen from his personal computer, the video
footage the drone shot at the party. It turns out that Tyler and Leah got into
an argument — Leah wanted Tyler to commit to her and definitively break with
Sophie, but Tyler took the typical bullheaded-male attitude of “No one’s going
to tell me whom I can or can’t fuck,”
and pushed her down a flight of stairs in a fit of anger, thereby killing her.
The climax occurs at Sophie’s and Paula’s home — mom, upset that Sophie ignored
her demands not to socialize with anyone unsupervised and kept investigating the
case, counterproductively confiscates Sophie’s cell phone and thereby nearly
misses the warning Mikey sent containing footage he’s shot with the drone of
Tyler and Ryan plotting how to cover up the murder. She finally gets the
message while Tyler is in their home; he came ostensibly to apologize to Sophie
and see if she wanted to resume their relationship, but really to kill both Sophie and Paula if they insisted on
doing something stupid like turning him in to the police. Tyler corners Sophie
at the top of a flight of stairs and threatens to push her down them, but she
manages to escape long enough that Paula can hit him in the back of the head
with a frying pan, knocking him out and rendering him unconscious until the
sound of sirens and the sight of flashing lights lets them and us know that the
police have finally arrived.
Cheerleader Nightmare is actually one of Lifetime’s best recent movies;
not only does director Boyle have a flair for suspense but the writers, whoever
they are, have created genuinely interesting and conflicted characters who act,
for good or ill, from recognizable human motives. It’s a quite chilling movie
and one that keeps the viewer’s interest, and it’s also quite ably acted —
especially by Taylor Murphy in the lead, who plays the role matter-of-factly
and with quiet determination; and Johnny Visotcky as the killer, who wisely
avoids portraying him as a psycho — even though the hint that he’s a criminal
because he’s inherited it from his dad rubs me the wrong way. All in all, Cheerleader
Nightmare is a quite capable piece
of work and one of those diamonds in the rough that keep people like me
watching Lifetime movies! It’s also an interesting exploration of just how much
modern technology has made everyone’s — especially everyone who’s a teenager in
a relatively affluent community, and therefore comfortable with and having full
access to the technology — life an open book; you can’t have a clandestine affair anymore with all the security
cameras and that damned drone (which practically becomes its own character in
the film) spying on you all the time.
