by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was
Her Worst Nightmare, though it seems to
have had at least two other titles — imdb.com lists Trigger Warning as an alternative title and shows a poster ad for
the film giving its name as Degrees of Fear. Under whatever title it’s a quite capable piece of
suspense filming which opens with our heroine, Dakota Hagerty (Claire
Blackwelder), being held captive with two other women, Terri (Kelly Heyer) and
Minda (Alexandra Sedlak), by a monster named Jake Weber — whom we never see and
who in some ways assumes an almost godlike presence because we don’t see him. The three are plotting an escape
attempt and are just about to execute it when the door to the basement where
they’re being held is crashed open and a police SWAT team rescues them. The
film then cuts to a college, where Dakota is a student in the abnormal
psychology class taught by professor John Campbell (Taylor St. John). Though
she didn’t have the usual prerequisites for the class, Campbell admitted her
anyway on the recommendation of another professor and said her paper on sexual
deviance was way better than that of any of her other students, even though
she’s just bombed out on the midterm and got a D. She pleads with Campbell to
be allowed to stay in the class and improve her work so she can keep the
work-study job at the campus library she needs to survive.
Then she realizes
that someone is stalking her and leaving reminders of her past, including a
plastic model of the P-51 Mustang World War II fighter (Jake Weber hung models
of that plane from the ceiling of the basement where he held his captives) and
a VHS tape (Jake was still old-school enough he watched VHS tapes) that’s new
surveillance footage of her taken after her release. The film was produced under the same auspices as the
previous night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Killer Night Shift — the companies were Florida’s Sunshine Films
(though this movie was actually shot, and presumably set, in Kentucky) and
Marvista Entertainment, the director was Damián Romay (solo this time, and
showing himself a good enough suspense director he deserves a chance to break
out of the Lifetime ghetto and make theatrical features) and some of the
production staff were also the same, though the writer, Angelle Halley Gullett,
was different. She (I’m presuming “Angelle” is a she) left one huge plot hole:
though Dakota Hagerty was featured prominently in a real-life case that got
major publicity, and she has a relatively unusual name, no one on campus except
for one student, Ally (Jasmine
Johnson), an African-American reporter on the school newspaper who becomes
Dakota’s friend and confidante (given what usually happens to Lifetime
heroines’ Black friends and confidantes I was expecting her not to make it out
of the movie alive, but for once I was wrong) recognizes her or associates her
as one of Jake Weber’s victims. Ally wants to get a first-person interview with
Dakota to get her story of her abduction and life as Jake’s sex slave, but
Dakota — who was the one of Jake’s three victims who refused to testify against
him at his trial — doesn’t want to talk about any of it. Instead she walks around campus and mopes,
then after she sees the stalking video made of her she suddenly turns around
and is eager to nail the new person who’s tormenting her with information about
the case that was never publicly released and which the person therefore could
have known only if they had a direct line to Jake himself.
During all this we
get a confrontation scene between Dakota and her former fellow victim Terri,
who’s changed her name to “Cynthia” and is determined to live her life as if
none of this ever happened — she’s even engaged to a man who has no idea of her
past. We also learn later that the third victim, Minda, killed herself. Dakota
and Ella find out from the prison records that psych professor John Campbell
leads a group for sex offenders at the prison where Jake Weber is being
incarcerated, and from that Dakota deduces that Campbell is her mystery stalker
and he got the information about her from Weber himself in his group — only
when Dakota confronts Campbell at a bar (where he’s invited her for more
prosaic seductive purposes — he’s the sort of letchy professor who’s been a
staple of college fiction, as well as college life, though in the era of #MeToo
it’s getting much harder for randy male professors on the make to seduce and
fuck their more attractive female students) he convinces her that Jake Weber
has never been in his group. Then it turns out the real villain is Max Peterson
(Bryan Lillis), who at the start of the movie replaced Campbell’s former
teaching assistant Ella (Denise Johnson) when Ella suddenly disappeared and
throughout the film has been sidling up to Denise, acting supportive and
obviously cruising her in what we think is a maybe creepy but not inappropriate
fashion. Though Her Worst Nightmare
has a different writer from Killer Night Shift, Romay and his producers were obviously going for the
same gimmick — a “surprise” reversal (in quotes because it’s really not that
surprising) in which the guy we’ve been led to believe was the creep turns out
to be O.K. and the guy we’ve been led to believe was nice turns out to be the
villain, a copycat obsessed with Jake Weber to the point of wanting to repeat
his crimes. It was Max who kidnapped Campbell’s former assistant Ella and held
her in his basement à la Jake
Weber, and he’s now decided to add Dakota to his harem — only Dakota ends up
breaking free of his bondage, helping Ella to escape and ultimately stabbing
Max with the hobby knife with which he was threatening her until she got it
away from him (though there’s a final scene in which he appears to be alive and
headed for prison rather than death).
Her Worst Nightmare is a quite good suspense thriller and a well-done
exploration of the long-term traumas faced by women after they’re freed from
long-term sex-slave captivity — even some of the stories based on, and with the
involvement of, real-life victims haven’t gone so far into the long-term
effects of this awful and inhuman ordeal. The writing here is surprisingly sensitive
and insightful, and the movie overall is quite worthwhile and well acted,
especially by the principals. Claire Blackwelder (despite her ridiculous name)
is a quite good actress who manages to delineate the forces tearing apart her
character, including the conflict within her over whether to seize the
initiative or just slink back into inactivity. She’s especially powerful when
she responds to the news of her former fellow captive Minda’s suicide by saying
that she, too, has been tempted in that direction just to make the traumas go
away. And Bryan Lillis matches her and makes both the openly solicitous and
secretly deviant parts of his character believable, while Trevor St. John is
quite good as the snotty professor who thinks it’s one of the perks of the job
to help himself to whatever nubile female body in his class will hold still for
him, and is increasingly resentful that changing mores, norms and laws are
getting in the way of his sordid pursuits. Jasmine Johnson — at least that’s
who I think played Ally, though
I’m guessing since she’s not listed with a character name on the imdb.com page
of the film and there isn’t a photo of her on the site — is an electric
personality and welcome in the part of the heroine’s good buddy and ultimate
rescuer. This is definitely one of the better items I’ve seen on Lifetime — Killer
Night Shift was surprisingly good but this
is an even more accomplished piece of filmmaking — and it certainly marks
Damián Romay as a director to watch!
