by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Watergate I watched the second go-round of last night’s
Lifetime “premiere,” a movie rather clinically called Psycho Prom Queen which was directed by Philippe Gagnon from a
script by Barbara Kymlicka — and while her usual collaborators in creating the
“Whittendale Universe,” J. Bryan Dick and Ken Sanders, weren’t involved in this
one, it was very much in the mold of previous scripts by Ms. Cum-Licker. The
central character is an unscrupulous bitch named Amy Turner (Allie McDonald), a
senior at Avondale private high school who will literally do anything to get her and her boyfriend Dylan Wade (a quite
exciting young man named Trevor Momesso, who’s a lot of fun to look at even
though Kymlicka’s script gives him little to do except hang around in Amy’s
wake and get one scene at a party in which
he wants to fuck her and she puts him off, saying she wants them to wait until
prom night after they’ve been crowned prom
king and queen) elected king and queen of the school prom. Her principal
antagonist is her trigonometry teacher, Julie Taylor (Zoe McLellan,
top-billed), who took what she euphemistically called a “leave” from her
teaching gig a year earlier but has been called back to take over a class
formerly taught by Joanne Harvey (Anana Rydvald) until Joanne mysteriously
disappeared. Her car was found abandoned on an old road near the woods, and the
police assumed she committed suicide even though her body was never found.
Joanne and Julie were old friends and Julie had just received a postcard from
Joanne congratulating her on a year of sobriety before Joanne’s disappearance —
yes, that mysterious “leave” was really an alcoholic burn-out triggered by the
death of Julie’s mother that led to the breakup of Julie’s marriage to Mark
(Matthew Alan Taylor — so the actor has the same last name as his character),
who sued for custody of their daughter Miya (Nia Roam) and nearly won it. Julie
won joint custody but only by agreeing to go into rehab and join Alcoholics
Anonymous afterwards.
Amy decides to wage war on her new trig teacher by
befriending Miya, thereby letting Miya into the “cool kids’” circle and using
that as a way to worm herself into Julie’s home, where she sees an AA card on
Julie’s refrigerator and splits Julie and Miya by planting a bottle under
Julie’s bed to make it look like Julie has relapsed. Apparently Amy is
determined to do everything she can to make sure she passes trig except actually studying it
(though I was so bored by trigonometry in high school I can readily identify
with her!); when she fails her test and it threatens to pull her grade point
average below the threshold of eligibility for prom queen, she sweet-talks
Julie into giving her a makeup, and she worms an advance copy of the test out
of Mr. Peters (Matt Holland), a male teacher she’s scared into doing her
bidding by threatening to (falsely) report him for sexually assaulting her if
he resists. She’s sure she can pass the makeup because [spoiler alert!] the previous teacher, Joanne Harvey, is not dead:
Amy kidnapped her and is holding her in a shed on her family’s property she
calls her “clubhouse.” She’s regularly stealing drugs from her mom Elaine
(Judith Baribeau), a nurse who’s working so many hours she’s almost never home,
and using them not for herself but to keep Joanne narcotized and therefore
unable to escape. Amy has Joanne fill out the test for her and manages to get
Mr. Peters to distract Julie long enough to substitute Joanne’s test paper for
the one Julie had given her normally — only Joanne deliberately sabotaged Amy
by filling in the wrong answers. By threatening to kill her, Amy gets Joanne to
give her the answers to the final and fill out the test paper in her own hand —
only Julie recognizes Joanne’s handwriting on the test and figures out, if not
all Amy’s scheme, enough of it that she follows Amy and discovers her in the
woods — whereupon Amy says she’ll claim that Julie got drunk and hit her, and
to make it look real she hits herself in the head three times. The school
authorities buy Amy’s story — there’s a strong suggestion that they’re all cowed by her and her unscrupulousness (earlier
Julie had visited a former teacher at the school who resigned after Amy ruined
her career and broke up her marriage — presumably by seducing her husband,
though we’re not told that) — and fire Julie, but Julie’s daughter Miya (ya
remember Miya?) is still going to the
prom and in fact has volunteered for the committee that runs the events and
counts the votes for prom king and queen. Amy confronts Miya in the
vote-counting room and, when she learns that she’s lost, beats up Miya and
knocks her unconscious, then locks her in the room and substitutes the card
listing her and Dylan as king and queen for the correct one, sort of like La
La Land and Moonlight at the Academy Awards.
Fortunately Julie and Amy’s
own mother Elaine (who look almost alike — casting directors Linda Berger, Sara
Kay and Jenny Lewis slipped up badly by casting two women as the mothers who
are annoyingly hard to tell apart!) figure out what’s going on and rescue
Joanne from the box in which Amy has nailed her shut. The three of them then
report the whole affair to the police, who do a Law and Order-style arrest of Amy just as she’s delivering her
big speech accepting the honor of being prom queen. Though much of Kymlicka’s
script is just silly, Psycho Prom Queen has an oddly haunting quality, much of it coming from Allie McDonald’s
terrific performance as Amy. Sauntering through the action with electrifying
platinum-blonde hair and an air of dominating every environment she’s in,
McDonald turns in a performance that hits all the marks for a Lifetime teen
psycho but also totally transcends them: we believe in Amy’s drivenness as well
as her unscrupulous, and “get” how she’s so totally intimidated everyone around
her, including the teachers and school officials who are supposedly her
superiors. Director Philippe Gagnon doesn’t do much but at least he doesn’t get
in McDonald’s way — and I was relieved when Kymlicka’s script allowed Joanne to
be rescued alive instead of found dead (when Gagnon shot Amy walking into the
woods with a hammer in her hand I assumed she was going to use it to bludgeon
Joanne to death once her usefulness to her was ended). Psycho Prom Queen — originally filmed under the less risible and
more legitimately sinister title Mean Queen — is cut pretty much to the usual Lifetime formula
but also manages to transcend it.
