by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was a pretty typical
tale called Room for Murder in which
college student Kristen Atherton (Lorynn York, dark-haired) returns to the
small town in which she grew up with her tail between her legs after she failed
to get an on-campus job that was crucial to her being able to stay in her
college town for the summer and afford to attend the next year. She shows up at
the home of her mother Moira (Tanya Clarke, blonde) expecting to be able to
spend the summer staying in her old room, only she finds out that mom has
rented out the room to a mysterious stranger named Jake (James Maslow,
top-billed). What’s more, she finds out that Jake is considerably more than
just Moira’s roommate: first she catches them locking lips on the back stairs,
and then she gets kept awake all night by the sound of them fucking. Kristen is
naturally shocked at the thought of her mom having an affair with a man just
two years older than Kristen herself — indeed, her adjustment to her mom’s new
studly lover while Kristen herself has rotten luck with men, though a guy she
used to date when she lived in town and was still in high school, Ryan Jessop
(Adam Huber), is still interested in her even though she broke up with him when
she caught him having sex with someone else, might in itself have made for an
interesting movie. Alas, this is Lifetime and some of their veteran producers,
directors and writers — the director is Rob Schmidt and the writer Jed Seidel —
who know the formula well enough that instead of the ambiguous title they shot
the film under, The Boarder, they
had to call it Room for Murder
and duly supply a few murders. When she isn’t too busy tearing up the sheets
with her hot new lover, Moira owns a beauty salon in town and should be making a lot of money, only she’s losing it all
and doesn’t know why. Kristen offers to help her sort her books and decides
that the reason Moira’s salon isn’t profitable is she’s got too many employees
working too long shifts and collecting mandatory overtime, so Kristen lowers
the boom on her mom and tells her she’s got to start either cutting people’s
hours back or laying them off altogether. The first person who gets the ax
under Kristen’s regime is Moira’s friend and confidante Mi (Jenna Kanell) —
once we see her on screen and register that she’s African-American we don’t
hold out much hope for her life expectancy; somehow or other, we realize, she’s
going to stumble onto the truth about Jake and he’s going to find out and kill
her.
This duly happens when she’s walking by a laundromat and sees Jake
removing clothes from a washer someone else is using; the someone else, another
Black woman more heavy-set and darker-skinned than Mi, takes strong exception
to this and Jake literally screams at her, losing his cool completely before he
recovers his composure and offers to pay for her dryer load (which she,
virtuously, refuses); Mi confronts him about this (instead of just observing it
and then confiding to Moira, or calling the police — all too often Lifetime
characters, both good and evil, do dumb things like that when the smart
alternative is readily obvious to more than the most pea-brained audience
members) and for her pains she’s strangled in a convenient alleyway and no one
seems to find her body. Moira briefly wonders why Mi isn’t showing up for work
but otherwise she just totally forgets about her, and so do the filmmakers! Kristen
becomes convinced that Jake is a serial killer who targets joggers and
strangles them in the middle of the night — and director Schmidt and writer
Seidel go the Hitchcock route (not that I’m comparing them in terms of level of
talent!) of letting us know from the outset that Jake is a killer and creating
suspense not out of revealing who the murderer is at the end but making us wonder
how the characters will find out
what we already know and how many of the dramatis personae will end up as collateral damage before he’s finally
brought to book. I’ll say one thing for Schmidt and Seidel: they give us lots of soft-core porn, not only between James Maslow and
Tanya Clarke but between Adam Huber and Lorynn York as well — for, not knowing
whom to turn to, Kristen goes to see her ex-boyfriend Ryan, who was a
scapegrace ne’er-do-well when she left town but now has got hired onto the
local police force. Accordingly Kristen steals a sneaker from Jake’s room that
has red spots on it and gives it to Ryan to have it sent to a police lab and
tested to see if it’s blood and, if so, if its DNA matches one of the mystery
jogger-killer’s victims. Ryan says, “What will you give me for this?,” and his
price is a dinner date, that soon enough blossoms into several dinner dates and
then a lubricious sequence in which Adam Huber turns out actually to be
nicer-looking than James Maslow (we get lots of shirtless shots of both of
them, and Huber is more muscular and has bigger pecs: yum!). This is one
Lifetime movie in which the hottest guy in the dramatis personae is not
the villain, though frankly, until we actually saw Jake strangle Ni he and Ryan
looked enough alike — both tall, slender, with dark hair and trimmed beards — I
was waiting for a twist ending in which it would be Ryan who’d be the killer and Jake would save Kristen’s
life by taking him on at the end.
The film begins with one of Lifetime’s
sometimes engaging, sometimes annoying flash-forward prologues in which we see
the front of the Atherton home with a young man in a cop’s uniform lying
face-down in front of it, obviously wounded, and other cops driving to the
door, finding him and calling in, “Officer down!” Then we get a typical
Lifetime title reading Four Days Earlier,
and it’s a wonder in some ways that Schmidt and Seidel crowd so many incidents
and such a total breakdown of the Atherton family’s relations in just four days
of filmic time — but though Room for Murder is O.K. entertainment (and the lubricious scenes of
hot young men having their way with willing women definitely give it a boost —
Lifetime has been cutting back on their soft-core porn lately and it’s nice to
find it return!) it’s little more than that. Jake tells the Athertons that he’s
a retired Wall Streeter who found working 70 hours a day just to make himself
even more insanely rich than he already was too stifling and wanted to get out
of that life — we never learn whether that’s true but he’s obviously not
hurting for money, and we also learn that in his native Georgia he was tried
for murder of a high-school classmate but was acquitted (though this is the
clue that enables Kristen to trace him online and find out who he is), but
aside from that he’s pretty much a blank. Interestingly, the Lifetime
“premiere” movie scheduled for the very next day — Sunday, July 9 — is called Murdered
at 17 and the character in that one who may
or may not be the perpetrator of the titular murder is also named Jake!
