by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Mommy Group Murder
Lifetime ran a “premiere” of something called A Daughter’s Deception, which was a curious variation on one of their
frequent tropes — the long-lost child of a couple turns up and identifies
themselves, but are they really
the person they say they are? This time the directors are Devon Downs and Kenny
Gage, and the writer Adam Rockoff — who previously created the film Devious
Nanny — and they cast Kennedy Tucker as the
mystery woman who comes to the home of Michael (Rusty Joiner) and Laura (Jade
Harlow, top-billed) Parker and claims to be Bree Hogan, long-lost daughter of
Laura back when she was still living at home, her last name was Bishop, and she
“made a mistake,” had sex with some no-goodnik (we’re never told who he was or
how they met, but we can guess), got “with child” and was turned out by her
ferociously religious parents, who wouldn’t allow her to have an abortion but
worked out a deal to turn her child over to an adoptive family as soon as she
was born. We see her in the delivery room and then we cut to a title reading,
“Twenty Years Later” — we’re used to sudden time jumps between the prologues
and the main parts of Lifetime movies but 20 years is a bit much even for them.
Twenty years later the Parkers receive word that Laura’s ferociously judgmental
ultra-religious parents have just died in a household accident — their home
filled with carbon monoxide and it killed both of them — but two police
officers, a white one named Detective Holmes (Jordan James Smith) and his Black
partner, whose name I can’t recall and who isn’t listed on imdb.com, show up
and say it’s a 50-50 chance whether the fatal event was an accident or an
intentional murder. Laura hasn’t seen these people since they turned her out
for getting knocked up 20 years earlier and so she’s no more than
intellectually upset by their deaths, but she regards the convenient appearance
of Bree, the daughter those crazy parents forced her to give up for adoption
two decades earlier, as a sort of cosmic compensation. Laura takes to Bree
instantly and Bree even wins the affections of Skylar (Brianna Gage), Laura’s
and her husband Michael’s natural-born child, not only by being the big sister
Skylar always wanted but threatening the school bully, Chloe Lopresti (Katelyn
Dunkin), after Chloe chest-punched Skylar in the high-school hallway for
allegedly looking at Chloe’s (unseen) boyfriend. But Michael remains
suspicious, though not so
suspicious that he says no when Laura decides to throw a backyard party for the
neighbors to celebrate her long-lost daughter’s return to the fold.
Michael
runs a computer company and his star programmer is the young, very hot twink Gareth Drury (Max Gray Wilbur), who does a
Web search and realizes “Bree” is not who he seems, but he doesn’t last very
long because at the party he confronts Bree and she says, “You’ve found out a
lot about me. Too bad you’ll never live to tell anybody.” Then she raises a
large rock behind him and crushes his head with it. Surprisingly, it takes
almost an hour of running time for anyone to notice that Gareth is missing even
though Michael and the company’s attorney, Arthur Bishop (David Starzyk), keep
trying to reach him on a cell phone which keeps going to voicemail. The Parkers
also get a visit from Jon Lopresti (Andrew Pagana), father of the bully who
tried to beat up their natural child Skylar and herself got warned off by Bree,
and they’re able to tell him off without either them or Skylar getting in any
more trouble. In the end it’s Skylar who decides to investigate Bree, and to
that end she tracks down Bree’s adoptive parents, the Hogans (Brian McGovern
and René Ashton), after Bree has told her that the Hogans actually favored her
over their own biological child Jessie, and Jessie got so resentful of her
parents for favoring the adopted daughter over her she went crazy and ended up
in a mental institution. The moment we hear that we figure that directors Downs and Gage and writer
Rockoff are preparing us for a big switcheroo that [spoiler alert!] will explain that “Bree” is really Jessie, who
either got released or escaped from the mental institution and decided to
avenge herself against her parents by targeting everyone Bree would have cared
about, starting with her natural mom and extending to Gareth — whose body she
stashed in a shed on the Parkers’ property (wouldn’t it have started to smell?)
— as well as Detective Holmes, who seems to have watched too many reruns of Columbo and decided to adopt the modus operandi of Peter Falk’s fabled character in getting
murderers to confess by irritating the hell out of them. Alas, Detective Holmes
makes the mistake of turning his back on “Bree” and she stabs him to death,
then takes his body out to join Gareth’s in the shed. (Wouldn’t it start to
smell as the bodies disintegrated in the warm weather?)
It all starts to fall
apart when Skylar visits the Hogans and just as she’s getting ready to leave
the real Bree (Skyler Wright, who
also played a secondary role in the same filmmaking team’s Devious
Nanny), shows up. Skylar asks the Hogans
who she is and they tell her, and then Skylar realizes the “Bree” they’ve been
hosting and letting into their family is really Jessie Hogan, the Hogans’
biological daughter who never got over her parents bending over backwards to
make the adopted one feel at home by ignoring their own natural child. Skylar
tries to alert her own parents but doesn’t reach them in time, though in the
climax the Parkers are rescued by Detective Holmes’ surviving Black partner
(once again, in a Lifetime movie, the sensible Black character shows up to save
the dumb white ones from their stupidities) and, somewhat to my surprise,
though she’s murdered two people Jessie Hogan is merely returned to a mental
institution, where in the final scene she’s hanging outside a group that is
supposedly doing therapy and muttering to herself, “The next time I pick a
family it’s going to be a real
one” — which I wondered if writer Rockoff intended as a reversal of his
reversal and wanted us to think that the one in the institution was Bree and
the one out, free and clear was Jessie. A Daughter’s Deception is actually a pretty good Lifetime movie, though
watching it after Mommy Group Murder
probably did it no favors — still, the performances by the two young leading
women, Kennedy Tucker as the psycho and Brianna Gage as the teenager who
figures her out, help make up for the relative dullness of Jade Harlow as the
mother, who seems to go through the whole movie with a fixed expression of mild
suffering; and Rusty Joiner, who’s genuinely sexy but looks so young we’d be more likely to believe her as Harlow’s
son than her husband!
