by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” an interesting
but incredibly frustrating movie called Who’s Stalking Me? which takes place in the Los Angeles suburb of Los
Feliz and deals with a woman, Amanda Rinna (Chelsea Ricketts) — at least I think that’s her last name since it was only spoken once,
in passing, by one of the other characters — who in the opening scene is on the
phone to her best friend Jeannie (Cara Santana) when her house is broken into
and she’s assaulted by a man dressed in black and wearing a black ski mask. She
throws a camera at him — she’s in advertising and her home includes a photo
studio where she does shoots for her clients’ ads — and it flashes as it lands.
Amanda runs her boutique advertising agency with a business partner, Liam
(Bryan Lillis), whom she used to date but has since broken up with as a lover
while keeping him as a partner. The attack by the mysterious masked man is
broken up by a police detective, James Dawson (Michael Welch), who’s a head
shorter than Liam and has sandy-brown instead of black hair but is otherwise
much the same physical “type.” Both men dress in khaki slacks — though Welch
fills his a lot better: he flashes a giant basket and a nice ass that were
making me fall in lust with him — which means it’s not all that easy for the
first 20 minutes or so to tell them apart. This film was one of Michael
Feifer’s productions (he produced, directed and co-wrote with John Burd), which
meant it has a lot of loose ends even for a Lifetime movie. Once he’s broken up
the attack on Amanda, Dawson hangs around her a lot, throwing that big basket at us on screen and making
it clear to Amanda, Jeannie and us that he has the hots for Amanda and is just
waiting to clear the case so he can start dating her and hopefully make it to
the bedroom. He also casually mentions to her that at least six other women
have reported being similarly victimized by home invaders in black outfits and
ski masks.
Since the intruder broke the lock on Amanda’s door, Dawson
volunteers to install a new home security system for her — only, like an awful
lot of Lifetime villains in this heavily surveilled age, he takes the
opportunity to bug her home with both spy cameras and hidden microphones so he
can keep tabs of everything she does. Meanwhile Dawson’s partner, Valencia
(Nicole Ochoa, a talented actress I wish we’d have got to see more of), gets
asphyxiated when someone locks her in her car and fills it with carbon monoxide
to make it look like she killed herself. Just why this happens is something of a mystery since Feifer
and Burd never bother to explain whodunit or why — but then even Raymond
Chandler forgot to attribute one of the murders in The Big Sleep, so at least he’s in good company on that one — but later Amanda’s friend Jeannie is the victim
of another home invasion attack by Mr. Black Ski-Mask. The main suspense issue
is which of the two men in Amanda’s life — Dawson or Liam — is stalking her: is
it the spurned ex-lover or the cop who’s unhealthily obsessed with her? Both
Jeannie and Amanda herself complain about Detective Dawson’s attentions to his
supervisor, Captain Marcus (an African-American woman with close-cropped,
bleached-blonde hair — memo to Black women: unless you’re Beyoncé you’re not
going to look good with blonde hair! — played by Harry Belafonte’s daughter
Shari, and yes, the family resemblance is strong), but he’s one of her best
detectives and without more evidence there’s nothing she can do about him. In
the end [spoiler alert!] it turns
out both Dawson and Liam are
villains: Dawson had an unhealthy obsession with Amanda and bugged her house,
as well as framing one of Loz Feliz’s usual suspects, Reese (Brock Burnett),
for the crime — Dawson first arrests Reese and then, when he gets out after a
judge throws out the case against him, Dawson gives him Amanda’s gun, then
shoots him — and later Dawson shoots Liam and frames Amanda for the crime by
using that gun, which he’d urged her to buy in the first place and then stole
from her.
Also Amanda and Liam land a potentially star-making account from a
woman named Carlson (Caia Coley), only at the party Amanda throws to celebrate
someone spikes Carlson’s drink with strawberry juice, since she’s announced
early on that she’s deathly allergic to strawberries. (She sends someone out to
her car to get her EpiPen — if she was that allergic, wouldn’t she have carried it on her
person?) The finale occurs on a rooftop during another party, in which Amanda
and Liam are celebrating not only the Carlson account but the resumption of
their personal relationship — only Captain Marcus crashes the party and
announces that the picture Amanda’s camera accidentally took of her attacker
when she threw it at him revealed, after it was digitally enhanced at the
police lab, that Liam, not
Dawson, was the mystery ski-masked attacker. So in the end Amanda has a
successful business but is left alone since both the men in her life were psychos — a typical Michael
Feifer twist I could have done without; with author Cynthia Diamond’s words
ringing in my ears that a romance needs to end with the heroine happy ever
after, or at least happy for now, with one of the men in the story, the nihilistic ending of this one bothered me
even more than it might have otherwise, though it’s all too typical of Michael
Feifer’s twist-in-the-knife style of storytelling. Who’s Stalking Me? is frustrating because the basic plot premise had
the potential for an interesting and unsettling thriller — a better writer
(Christine Conradt, maybe?) might have made more of Amanda’s who-can-I-trust
dilemma, and she would have come up with some sort of motivation for both the weirdos in her life
whereas Feifer and Burd couldn’t have cared less What Made Dawson and Liam Run.
