by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a movie called He’s
Watching, though imdb.com lists it under
the working title Old Flames —
which actually is more descriptive of what it’s really about. Once upon a time
Angela (Linsey Godfrey) was a free-spirited college student whose ambition — to
the extent she had one at all — was to be a short-story writer. She dated (and
wrote a lot of sappy love notes to) Kyle Miller (Tilky Jones, one of the
gorgeously hot young leads from the Lifetime film Open Marriage), but then they broke up. Years passed and Angela
started focusing on her career, ultimately becoming an investment advisor and
pairing up with Michael (Darri Ingolfson), an attorney who’s out of town a lot
working on taking depositions for one big case or another. They’re not married
— though Michael proposes to Angela during the film — but they’re living
together and in every other respect seem a solid couple when Kyle returns from
Angela’s past. Ostensibly he’s at her office to discuss investing his money
with her firm — not only is he a successful photographer but his father was a
real-estate developer and left him a substantial inheritance — but it’s clear
what he’s really after. He wines
and dines Angela and actually gets her to go to bed and have sex with him — a
nice bit of the sort of soft-core porn that gives a lot of otherwise dull
Lifetime movies some appeal — certainly the sight of the nearly naked Tilky
Jones gave this viewer a charge.
At this point it wasn’t clear which
set of Lifetime clichés writer Todd Samovitz and director Steven Brand were
going for — the woman beset by the crazy stalker trying to win her away from
the decent guy or the decent guy who’s going to save the woman from a boyfriend
whose out-of-town trips were a cover for illegal activities, infidelities or
both — and frankly I suspect I would have liked this movie better if Kyle had
been Angela’s white-knight savior from Michael’s corruption.
Instead, once we
see a black box on his dresser top and realize he’s used it to make a secret
video of himself and Angela having sex, we know it’s Kyle who’s the rotter —
and in the great tradition of Lifetime stalkers he figures out how to get into
Angela’s apartment and her car. Of course he also threatens to send Michael
the tape of Kyle and Angela having sex if Angela doesn’t continue to see him —
and in the meantime Kyle also starts an affair with a model simply because she
vaguely looks like Angela. He’s Watching is yet another one of those movies in which the
writer and director didn’t know when to stop: not only does Kyle send Michael
the sex tape of himself and Angela, thereby precipitating his breaking up with
her and throwing her out of her house, he also hacks into Angela’s work
computer and makes it look like Angela has embezzled hundreds of thousands of
dollars from a client, thereby getting her fired. A devastated Angela moves in
with her friend Laurie (Shi Ne Nielson), who knew both her and Kyle in college
and offers to use her own computer-hacking skills to put back the money Angela
is alleged to have stolen and expose Kyle as the thief, but if you think writer
Samovitz and director Brand have a fate in mind for Kyle as bland as being
arrested for embezzlement and hacking, think again. It all comes to a climax
when Kyle invades Michael’s home, where Angela has gone to discuss a possible
reunion. Kyle knocks Michael out with a baseball bat just before Angela arrives
and puts him through a weird humiliation ritual in which he forces Michael to
read aloud the love letters Angela wrote Kyle way back when. Angela brings a
gun to the reunion (provided by Laurie in case Kyle showed up and caused
trouble) and drops Kyle but merely wounds him; Kyle gets the gun and threatens
to shoot Michael; then Angela is able to knock him to the floor, get the gun
away from him and shoot him just as he’s about to strangle the helpless
Michael.
The film opened with a prologue set in 1977 showing two people — an
older man and his young bimbo partner — drinking two glasses of something or
other and getting ready to have sex when something happens to interrupt them.
We don’t realize the significance of this scene until almost the end of the
film, when Kyle reveals that the couple were his father and his stepmother, a
“trophy wife” dad had married just a few months after Kyle’s mom died, and who
was already looting the trust accounts dad had set up for Kyle — so, at age 12
and looking very much like a male
version of Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed (which Lifetime is actually broadcasting a remake of next week, though
for some reason they changed the bad girl’s name from Rhoda to Emma — bah; Rob
Lowe is the director and he’s also playing the original William Hopper role of
the girl’s dad), Kyle knocked off dad and stepmom by sneaking poison into their
drinks. There’s also an epilogue introduced by a title, “269 Days Later” (why 269
days?), in which Angela has both
her job and Michael back (though Michael is such a milquetoast one wonders why
she wants him back) and Angela
has become a published author with a novel based loosely on her experience with
Kyle — only, in the sort of annoying open-ended ending Lifetime’s writers are
doing a lot of these days, a 12-year-old with the same flat affect Kyle had in
the flashback scene showing him that age comes up to her at a book signing and
asks for an autograph “for my mother.” He’s Watching is an O.K. Lifetime movie, one which delivers the
goods without being particularly innovative or exciting, and the biggest
mystery about it is just how the releasing company’s name should be spelled:
I’ve seen “Marvista Entertainment” (one word), “MarVista” (one word but with a
capital letter in the middle à la
computer-software nomenclature) and on this film’s opening credits, “Mar Vista”
(two words).
