by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime
“premiere” was of a film called Sorority Stalker — though it was shot under the more haunting
working title No Good Deed (as in “no good deed goes unpunished,” which succinctly describes what
happens to the hapless heroine of this film) — directed by Craig Goldsmith from
a script by Sandra Bailey, who also appears in the film in a short but
important role. Aya Stevens (Haley Webb) is the owner of the Dylan Keith beauty
salon in Los Angeles — why a woman-owned business is named after a man is
explained by her statement fairly well on in the running time that she didn’t
have the capital to start her own salon from scratch but had to buy an existing
one instead — when she and her receptionist Deanna (Lily Anne Harrison) notice
a young blonde woman (Haley Pullos — so both the heroine and the villain of
this piece are played by women with the first name “Haley”!) hanging around
outside the salon. Aya approaches her and the woman explains that her name is
Taryn, she knows little about her biological parents because she grew up in
foster care, she was working as a concierge for a New York hotel when she met a man named
Steve Reisner (Bryan Durfee, a nice hot blond piece of man-meat with great
pecs, but also someone we see only briefly). She fell madly in love with him,
so much so that she quit her job and moved to L.A. to be with him — at least
that’s what she tells Aya — only he’s ignored all her phone calls and texts, so
she’s alone in town with nowhere to stay and no job.
Aya invites her to move in
to her home — she’s renting a house from her aunt and she’s got a roommate,
Vicki (the role Sandra Bailey wrote for herself), but at the moment Vicky is
out of town for two weeks with her boyfriend Matt (whom we never see) and so
Aya invites Taryn to stay in Vicki’s room until Vicki gets back. Aya’s
masseuse, Lauren (Christel Khalil), goes on an online dating site and sets Aya
up to meet a guy named Aaron (whom we also never see), but Taryn sneaks access
to Aya’s phone and sends Aaron a text breaking the date, then erases Aaron’s
number from the phone so when Aya goes to the restaurant they were supposed to
meet at, she not only thinks he’s stood her up but she can’t call him to find
out what happened. So we already know that Aya is up to no good. Aya explains
that she particularly bonded with one foster mother named Sarah, only Sarah had
an abusive partner named Jack and one night their house burned down: Sarah got
Taryn out in time but then went back into the burning house to rescue Jack, so
they both died and Taryn was presumably scooped up and placed somewhere else.
We had seen some of this action in a prologue, and we learn more about this
because it’s the only shred of an explanation Sandra Bailey is going to give us
for What Makes Taryn Run and in particular why she’s so pathologically jealous
of anyone that comes between her
budding “sismance” with Aya. First she dresses up as a mugger and knocks out
Aya’s receptionist Deanna one night so Deanna will end up in the hospital with
two broken legs, she’ll have to take off work (though Charles wondered why,
since she doesn’t need to stand up to work and therefore she could still do her
job with broken legs), and of course Taryn talks herself into taking over as
Deanna’s replacement.
Then her happy little idyll with Aya both at home and
work is broken by the sudden appearance of Aya’s roommate Vicki (ya remember Aya’s
roommate Vicki?), who comes home
unexpectedly because she and her invisible boyfriend Matt had a fight and she
bailed on her out-of-town trip early. Vicki spots Deanna’s wallet and ID in her
room and confronts Taryn, saying that she’s going to call the police on her
because she may have fooled Aya but Vicki has caught on to her — only Taryn is
ahead of her: she takes care of the immediate danger by sneaking behind Vicki
and clubbing her to death. (Oops.) Then Lauren, still looking on dating Web
sites for guys she can set Aya up with, stumbles on a photo of Steve and
recognizes him as Taryn’s love object even though no one at the salon has ever
laid eyes on him — are we supposed to believe he’s the only young single guy named Steve in L.A.? She naturally
wonders why Steve still has his profile on dating sites when he’s supposed to
be Taryn’s boyfriend, and Lauren and Aya set up a meeting during which Aya will
confront Steve and ream him a new asshole over his shabby treatment of Taryn.
Only when they meet, Steve explains to Aya that he’s not in love with Taryn. Far from it: he hooked up with
her at the hotel where she worked and he was staying for out-of-town meetings
with clients and they had sex once, but then Taryn started stalking him,
leaving him endless messages until he finally reported her to her bosses at the
hotel and they fired her. Taryn interpreted this to mean that Steve had wanted her to get fired so there’d be nothing keeping
them apart anymore, and so she came out to L.A. and resumed her stalking of
Steve there — and when Taryn finally realizes that Steve has no ongoing
interest in her, she takes a gun Aya had bought for self-protection and hid in
the salon, goes to Steve’s house and shoots him dead. (It’s really a shame to
see Bryan Durfee’s beautifully smooth, creamy chest defaced by a wound like
that, even though I’m sure the actor himself remained undamaged and it was only
a special effect.)
Aya catches on when she gets worried about how long it’s
been since she saw Vicki; she calls Matt and Matt explains that she left him
days earlier and he hasn’t
heard from her since: all Matt’s calls to Vicki have gone to voicemail, and so
do Aya’s. She uses a find-your-phone app on her laptop at home to find Vicki’s
phone, and finds that it’s still on her property in the hand of a very dead
Vicki, whom Taryn left buried in a crude grave in Aya’s garden. (Just how Taryn handled the dead weight of a body —
especially one considerably larger and more buff than hers — is a mystery.)
Meanwhile, the police are interrogating Aya as a potential suspect in Steve’s
murder (ya remember Steve?) because according to his phone records she’s the last person who
communicated with him while he was alive. The climax occurs at the salon, where
Lauren (ya remember Lauren?) has figured out that Taryn is up to no good when it turns out that
Taryn was never a member of the sorority Aya was in, though she wore their
insignia as a pendant — she’d stolen it from her foster mother Sarah’s corpse
as the ambulance wheeled her away — and therefore the bond Taryn used to get in
Aya’s good graces (“sisters before misters,” the sorority slogan went) and get
Aya to take her into both her home and her business was B.S. Only Taryn, of
course, turns up and conks Lauren on the head, then threatens Aya with the gun
she stole from Aya’s drawer (ya remember the gun?) and says she’s going to make all Aya’s dreams of
a new salon of her own come true by burning the current one down and allowing
Aya to collect on the insurance. When Aya makes the mistake of asking Taryn why
she thinks she can get away with that, Taryn says, “Because I’ve done it
before,” and then we learn that she burned down her foster mother’s home,
hoping that would allow Sarah to get away from that abusive man — only instead
of fleeing with Taryn, Sarah went back into the house to rescue Jack and got
killed herself.
Fortunately Lauren comes to — it seems for once Taryn’s blow
wasn’t hard enough to kill — and knocks out Taryn before she can attack Aya or
start the fire, and the two good women lock Taryn in the salon’s restroom and
then call the police. Alas, when the cops come Taryn is gone — she opened the
restroom’s window and escaped — and Aya ends up with the loan she wanted to
expand her salon to the suddenly vacant adjoining property. She also ends up
with a boyfriend, Eric Davis (Travis Caldwell), an old high-school acquaintance
she ran into when he showed up at her salon for a massage (the closest thing we
got to a soft-core porn scene in this one was Haley Webb working on Travis
Caldwell’s back — he was shirtless but we never got to see the front of him
because this is one place where “massage” means exactly that, and no more);
when he turns up at the end and asks her for a date, and she explains that she
has a hard-and-fast rule not to date her clients, he says, “O.K., you’re fired.
Now can we have dinner?” (It’s the wittiest line in what’s otherwise a pretty
much by-the-numbers Lifetime script.) Meanwhile, Taryn — escaping in the sort
of open-ended ending Rod Serling was able to get away with on The Twilight
Zone but which is merely
irritating on Lifetime — latches on to another pigeon, an older woman named
Sarah who comes upon Taryn at a bus stop, assumes the bruises on her face come
from a battering husband she finally got up the courage to leave, and invites
her to live in the empty guest house she and her husband have available … Sorority
Stalker was an O.K. movie but
hardly Lifetime at its best, and it didn’t have the marvelously haunting
quality of Psycho Prom Queen (which Lifetime re-ran right after it), mainly because as the
villainess Haley Pullos was just average, hitting all the right marks in
delineating Lifetime’s Perky Psycho 101 but not really throwing herself into
the role and projecting the kind of lovable dementia Allie MacDonald did as the
(dare I say it?) psycho (would-be) prom queen. Also, Craig Goldsmith’s
direction was just functional, without the neat suspense twists of Philippe
Gagnon’s in Psycho Prom Queen, and though it was nice to see Sandra Bailey in the film as well as her writing it, she wasn’t as
adept as Christine Conradt (or even Psycho Prom Queen’s writer, Barbara Kymlicka, whose name I love
making dirty jokes about) in putting flesh on the bones of Lifetime’s clichés.
