by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” a film quite
misleadingly called Seduced by My Neighbor
that doesn’t actually feature the central character being seduced by her
neighbor (any more than the previous night’s “premiere,” Sorority
Stalker, actually featured any scenes set
in a sorority, probably a disappointment for any straight guys who turned it on
expecting to see a lot of young, nubile actresses playing sorority girls in
various stages of undress). Seduced by My Neighbor (originally shot under the more subtle working title
The Neighborhood Watch) starts
with a scene in which husband Neal Goodwin (Tim Bensch) is driving home to his
wife Sarah (Andrea Bogart, presumably no relation) and teenage daughter Allie
(Sierra McCormick) and telling them how much he loves them when his car is
suddenly driven off the road by another vehicle going in the other direction,
and he ends up dead. Then we get a chyron reading, “Two Years Later,” and two
years later Sarah and Allie have finally fulfilled Neal’s plan to move them to
the community of Pine Ridge, Kentucky where Neal had just placed his mother
Gladys (Beth Broderick) in a nursing home, so they can be near her. Sarah will make
her living by working as a nurse at the nursing home, which probably puts her
into closer contact with her former mother-in-law than any normal person would
want, but it’s all sweetness and light between the three surviving generations
of the Goodwin family. The bad guy is Mike Aaron (Trevor St. John), the on-site
security guard at the complex in which the Goodwins’ new home is, who
immediately takes a decidedly unrequited crush on Sarah and uses a variety of
nasty stratagems to get her. First he dresses as a burglar, all in black and
with a ski mask, and breaks into Sarah’s and Allie’s home, then he shows up in
his normal uniform and offers to revamp their security system so that doesn’t
happen again.
He not only gets their security code — so he can let himself into
their house any time he wants to —he wires the place so he can eavesdrop on
them and watch Sarah in bed and also see who’s using the hot tub. Grandma
Gladys has her own idea of who her former daughter-in-law should be dating —
Chris (Rocky Myers), a firefighter in the community and the son of one of her
fellow nursing-home residents — and, remarkably, Rocky Myers is genuinely hunky
and actually more attractive than Trevor St. John, a rare example of a Lifetime
movie in which the good guy is hotter than the bad guy. In fact, one of the
nicer aspects of Seduced by My Neighbor is the sheer amount of appealing beefcake: when the Goodwins get to
their new community the first man they see is a young guy named Dylan (Greg
Rogstad) who’s introduced, blessedly topless, in his backyard shooting hoops.
Writers David Hickey and Scott Collette have clearly introduced Dylan to serve
as a love interest for Allie, and later on in the film when Dylan and Allie
have a party in Sarah’s hot tub with another young couple, the male of that
couple is just as hot. Sarah and Chris have an old-Hollywood-style “meet-cute”
when one of the kids tries to microwave a metal popcorn container and starts a
house fire which Sarah learns about from the super-security system Mike has
installed; it’s put out without damaging anything but the microwave, but it
just adds to the sense of Mike as a sort of Big Brother wanna-be using his
control over their security system to eavesdrop on the Goodwins and hopefully
get Sarah into his life (and his bed). Alas, Mike is such a wimp by Lifetime
villain standards that the film is an hour and a half old before we finally get
to see him kill somebody: Julia Stevens (Reagan Pasternack), a woman who’s had her eye on him and threatens to tell Sarah all Mike’s dark secrets if Mike doesn’t
abandon his quest of Sarah and pair with Julia instead. Later he kills Gladys
Goodwin by sneaking into the nursing home (he installed their security system, too) and smothering her with a
pillow when she was about to “out”
him to Sarah, and the two murders finally awaken whatever Pine Ridge has for a
police department.
It all ends with Mike tricking Sarah and Allie by offering
them a ride to the nursing home, which has been on lockdown since Gladys’s body
was discovered, though since they’ve been unable to reach the place by phone
they have no idea that Gladys has been killed. Instead Mike drives the two
terrified women down a deserted mountain road, saying that his wife and their daughter were killed on the same stretch of road as
Sarah’s husband. It turns out it was the same accident: Mike’s wife and
daughter were running away from him to be with another man she’d been having an
affair with, and while they were on that road they encountered the car being
driven by Sarah’s husband Neal. The two cars swerved to avoid colliding but
Mike’s wife and daughter were killed, and though Neal survived the crash Mike
killed him on the spot for revenge. (The writers could have made the plot even
kinkier if they’d had Neal been the man Mike’s wife was going to run off with,
or if they’d followed up on a brief early hint that Mike’s lascivious interest
was not with Sarah but her daughter Allie, and he was following the Humbert
Humbert strategy of romancing the wife to get to the daughter — but the
lovey-dovey cell-phone prologue precluded the former and it’s probably just as
well they didn’t go with the latter.) Mike has knocked out Chris and stashed
him in the trunk of his car, and he demands that Sarah choose between them — if
she picks Mike he’ll only kill Chris but if she picks Chris he’ll kill them all
and make it look like an accident. Sarah plays along with him but her daughter
takes a pepper-spray container she’d hidden on her person (it had been passed
along from Neal to his mother to Sarah to Allie — pepper spray as a family heirloom?) and sprays it in Mike’s face,
causing him to drive off the road and enabling the women to knock him out
before the cops arrive and arrest him.
The film ends with a chyron reading,
“Six Months Later,” and six months later Sarah and Allie are still ensconced in
their security complex and Chris is still part of their lives and on his way to
becoming Sarah’s husband and Allie’s legal stepdad — only Mike, in prison,
bribes a guard to get him a smartphone and uses it to eavesdrop on Sarah and
Chris having sex in her still-wired bedroom. Seduced by My Neighbor isn’t the lubricious fun we would have expected from
that title — for all the sexual energy that’s driving the plot, we get
virtually nothing in the way of the soft-core porn that’s given a lot of
Lifetime movies their entertainment value — and Lifetime’s other writers and
directors (the director on this one was Sam Irvin) have got a lot more out of
these particular formulae than these people did. Though there are a lot of
nice-looking men in the cast, which helps, Seduced by My Neighbor is a pretty ordinary Lifetime movie that fails to
live up to the deliciously erotic promise of its title!
