by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Bachelor Next Door
was also pretty routine, made up by writer/director/producer Michael Feifer
from bits and pieces of previous Lifetime scripts about romantic obsessives
carrying unrequited torches on heroines for over a decade. In this case the
obsessive is Donnie Bradford (Michael Welch), who suddenly turns up in the home
next door to the main couple, Alex (Haylie Duff) and her live-in boyfriend,
investment advisor Gavin Barnett (Steven Bruns, who throws the usual Lifetime
formula “off” a bit by being better-looking overall than Michael Welch, though
one scene with the three principals together reveals that Welch has the bigger
basket). Alex is an aspiring artist and Gavin wants them to get married, but
Alex is holding off because she wants an independent career and doesn’t want to
be just a “wife.” The house next door is owned by an older couple, William and
Cindy Bradford, and Donnie claims that he’s their nephew and is essentially
house-sitting for them. This film contains a prologue, set in 2007 at a university
in Colorado, in which someone sexually assaulted Alex and someone else pulled
him off her — though we’re not told until the very end just who did what to
whom in this incident. All we really know about it is that Alex still has
nightmares in which she flashes back to it.
Alex meets Donnie when he happens
to come along with a fire extinguisher and puts out a fire in their kitchen;
she proclaims him her “hero” and Donnie gradually insinuates himself more and
more into their lives, doing home repairs and dating Alex’s sister Sage
(Brittany Underwood — see, I told
you she was in this movie!). The four of them spend time at a deserted mountain
cabin (not another deserted
mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie!), at which Donnie comes on to Sage, though
when they get together and are about to have sex Donnie blows it with her by
saying, “I’ve always loved you, Alex.” So Sage catches on that this guy is just
using her as a proxy for her sister. Somewhere along the way Gavin proposes to
Alex, who accepts, only Donnie decides to break them up by stealing an earring
from Gavin’s boss, and former lover, Jennifer Green (Preeti Desai), and writing
Gavin a fake e-mail, ostensibly from Jennifer, stating how glad she is that
Gavin has finally decided to resume their affair. Naturally Alex is pissed off
and mega-jealous about this, and she and Gavin have a fight which ends with
Gavin getting in his car and chasing after Donnie. Donnie spots him and calls
the police, saying that he’s being followed by a road-rage driver; Alex tries
to call Gavin and get him to turn around and come home, but too late: Gavin is
arrested, taken into custody and interrogated by an avuncular Black police
detective (Kim Estes). Eventually Gavin is able to sort out the
misunderstanding, get the detective to realize Donnie set all this up for his
own reasons, and get Alex to accept that whatever he had with Jennifer is long over and he has neither resumed it nor shown any
interest in doing so. So Donnie sneaks up behind Alex with a cloth containing a
knockout drug and uses it to kidnap her and take her at gunpoint to the
deserted mountain cabin (you just knew it was going to end at that deserted mountain cabin, didn’t you?),
which he’s picked as a location because it’s out of cell-phone range.
Both
Gavin and the police have caught on that Donnie really isn’t the Bradfords’
nephew — he set them up to burn to death in a car accident and simply took over
their home — and the detective traces Donnie back to college in Colorado in
2007. We’ve assumed all along that Donnie was the man who tried to rape Alex
way back when, but in fact [spoiler alert!] Donnie was actually the one who saved Alex from being raped by Johnny, a frat boy who also
had the hots for her, and Gavin, who was also at that college, saw the incident
but didn’t intervene because he didn’t see the attempted rape and thought it
was just two frat boys beating each other up as part of a hazing ritual. Donnie
had a crush on Alex even before he rescued her, and him saving her from a rapist
turned that crush into a lifelong obsession. (Kudos are in order to Feifer’s
uncredited makeup person for making Michael Welch look a decade younger,
considerably nerdier and acne-ridden in the flashback sequence.) Ignoring the
good advice of the detective to stay out of it and let the local police handle
the situation, Gavin drives up to the cabin with a gun of his own; he shoots
Donnie in the chest, Donnie fires back at him and misses, and then Alex gets
the gun away from Donnie and uses it to drill him with a clean shot to the
forehead, so when the cops arrive Donnie is already dead. An epilogue set a
year later shows Gavin and Alex finally getting married. The Bachelor
Next Door is in the middling run of
Lifetime movies, so predictable and clichéd (except for that neat reversal over
what really happened back in
2007) one pretty much guesses what’s going to happen an act or two in advance,
though it’s not as dementedly silly as some of Feifer’s scripts have been and
it works O.K. within the formula. Michael Welch’s superficially charming and
blessedly restrained performance as the psycho also helps, but for the most
part this is a pretty forgettable film.
