by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie I had especially high
hopes for based on its promos but which turned out to be a major disappointment: Suburban Swingers Club (the word “Swingers” should have an apostrophe at
the end of it but the official title doesn’t), which was promoted as a bit of
good clean dirty Lifetime fun titillating us with the depiction of extramarital
sex before slamming the doors on it and having the central couple revert to
monogamy at the end once they learn the sexual underground isn’t what it’s
cracked up to be. There are a few oddball departures from the usual Lifetime
formulae in that the central couple in the script, Grant (Jesse Ruda) and Lori
(Dana Davis) Mallick, are interracial — he’s white and she’s Black — though the
writers don’t make that a big
deal in their plot at all. The “original” story is by Whittendale Universe
creator Ken Sanders — though, since none of the characters have kids,
Whittendale University and the upper-class high schools that feed into it
aren’t part of this story — though he turned over the task of actually writing
the script to two other people, Christoff Bergeson and Mark Sanderson. The
director is Jessica Janos, and though one of the things I like about Lifetime is they’ve given opportunities to
women directors, this woman director really deserved a better script than she
got from the three guys who get the writing credits!
Grant and Lori have just
moved out of the city (unspecified) and bought a big house in suburbia — he’s a
big-shot attorney and she’s a would-be interior designer — and she goes into a
Proustian freak-out when she sees toys on the front lawn of their new home,
left there by the previous owner. The moment we see Dana Davis register shock
and anguish at the mere sight of children’s toys, any hardened Lifetime
movie-watcher’s mind immediately thinks, “Miscarriage,” and indeed just a few
minutes of running time later we’re told that Lori lost Grant’s baby after five
months of pregnancy but still keeps the sonogram image of her fetus as a keepsake,
memento, memorial or whatever. The miscarriage has pretty much killed Grant’s
and Lori’s sex life with each other, so they’re receptive when one of their new
neighbors, realtor Rachel Townes (Jessica Borden), invites them to a local
swingers’ group called “Circle of Trust” which is having a group sex party at
the end of that week. Grant is initially attracted to the idea; Lori is more
skeptical but agrees to go. Before that they’ve already spotted their gorgeous
hunk of a neighbor, Noah Crainor (James William O’Halloran), parading around
with his shirt off, building a canoe in his driveway and even having sex with a
blonde woman with his window curtains wide open, which shocks Lori. Noah not
only shows off pecs and an overall musculature to die for, he also projects an
air of insouciance, as if he’s well aware that all he has to do is say the word
or snap his fingers and he can have any sex partner he wants, female, male or anything in between. (Alas, the
plot of this movie remains relentlessly hetero and denies Gay viewers like me
the opportunity I was hoping for to see O’Halloran and Jesse Ruda cruise each
other; in the two-shots of O’Halloran and Ruda, both naked above the waist,
there’s some interesting homoerotic body language I don’t think the actors, the
writers or the director intended.)
The sex party is hosted by Victoria Pope
(Katrina Nelson) and her husband Roger (Jonathan Thompson), who’s grey-haired
(he’s the only person in the film’s sex scenes who looks older than
20-something) and whom we’re told is a super-rich real-estate developer — which
explains how he can have a house with so many bedrooms that each of the
extra-relational couples who pair off can do so in their own room. (The lack of
an orgy scene is yet another disappointment.) The group uses what Michael
Leigh, author of The Velvet Underground (the 1964 book about alternative sexual lifestyles which inspired the
name of Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s rock band), called “the car-key method of
selection” in which every member puts their keys into a bowl and draws one at
random, thereby determining just whom they’ll pair off with that night. Lori
draws Noah’s key and Grant gets that of Giselle (Nawal Bengholam), a
dark-haired beauty who remains frustratingly undercharacterized. We get some
O.K. soft-core porn shots of Noah and Lori getting it on — alas, director Janos
and cinematographer Joseph M. Setele make them way too dark to get the kinky thrill I was hoping for of
the stark color contrasts between white and Black bodies as they make love.
(I’ll confess to a love of interracial porn, and the color contrasts are the
biggest things about it that turn me on; an interracial scene in which the
Black participant was Obama’s color would do little for me.) Fortunately, the
next morning Grant and Lori are so turned on by having made it with other
people that they get it on themselves on their kitchen table, and that scene offered the kinky thrill of black-on-white
flesh that’s one of my turn-ons.
From that point, however, Suburban
Swingers Club turns into a quite ordinary
Lifetime stalker movie, as Noah gets obsessed with Lori, sneaks into her house,
surprises her, comes on to her and, when she makes the mistake of leaving him
alone in her home, takes impressions of her keys so thereafter he can let
himself in any time he wants to. He goes so far as to harass her in a furniture
store while she’s shopping with (and for) the first interior design client
she’s been able to land in the community, and the film reaches its low point
when Noah sneaks into Lori’s home while Grant is away on a “business trip” (in
quotes because the out-of-town trips are real but in the meantime he’s been
having an affair with Giselle, the woman he met at the party, and sneaking over
to her place for quickies before he heads out of town), takes an eyedropper
filled with a knockout drug, injects it into her wine glass and causes her to
pass out. When she comes to it’s the next morning and she’s alone on her
living-room couch with only blurry memories of what happened the night before.
Noah has disappeared but there are bits of his blood on her husband’s clothes
and their sheets, and a few days later Noah’s dead body is discovered in the
woods outside the neighborhood. Any real practitioner of a kinky lifestyle would have reported Noah to the
group’s leader as soon as he started stalking her — but Victoria Pope never
mentioned that as one of the group’s rules and Lori seems to have been unaware
that responsible kinksters, hearing that Noah was stalking group members
outside their parties, would have called him to account and thrown him out of
the group. Instead Noah’s dead body turns up and the police, whom Lori was
afraid to go to because then she would have had to confess to being at a
swingers’ party, show up in the persons of detectives Sato (Clint Jung) and
Kurland (Tyce Tilghman) and initially arrest Grant — who started the movie
clean-shaven but has since started to grow a moustache, apparently a visual
symbol of his growing involvement in extra-relational affairs — because they
found his footprint in the mud around the area where Noah’s body was
discovered. Grant eventually tells his wife that he came home after she called
him for help just before she lost consciousness, and when he arrived he saw
Noah’s body on the floor, assumed Lori had killed him, and disposed of the body
to protect her.
Suspicion next falls on Giselle, who had her own stalking
problem with Noah after they
paired up at one of the parties a year earlier, but in the end the real killer
turns out to be [spoiler alert!]
Noah’s long-suffering wife Olivia (Elizabeth Leiner), who in a jealous fit of
rage killed Noah with one of Lori’s kitchen knives and tried to frame Lori for
the crime, only Grant covered for Lori. In the end Lori’s sister Kat (Leigh-Ann
Rose) comes to her rescue, or tries to — Olivia clubs Kat with a golf club and
takes Lori to a deserted mountain cabin (not another deserted mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie!), only
instead of meeting the usual fate of the heroine’s African-American best friend
who stumbles onto the plans of the villain (or the villainess) and gets killed
for her pains, Kat comes to and calls the police, who are able to trace where
Olivia has taken Lori because Lori’s cell phone has been on all this time and
Olivia, carrying on the tradition of Lifetime’s Stupidest Criminals, never bothered to notice, much less shut it off. So
the cops get to listen to Olivia’s confession to murdering Noah and Lori’s
husband Grant is officially off the hook, only [spoiler alert 2!] instead of reconciling at the end and swearing off
extramarital affairs, Lori and Grant decide to divorce and they list their
house for sale with Rachel — the neighbor who invited them to the swingers’
party and thereby got them into this mess in the first place — while Lori
decides to move back to the city and live with her sister Kat. (Girl marries
boy, girl loses boy, girl gets sister.) That was an unsatisfying ending to a
disappointing movie; even more than Open Marriage, Lifetime’s last excursion into the extramarital sex
scene, this could have been a good film if its writers and director had known
when to stop. A movie about a couple who dip their toes into the swinging scene
(in Open Marriage they did it by
joining a sex club), only to find themselves drifting apart and realize that
the only way to save their marriage is to avoid other partners would have been more powerful than
one with the melodramatic complications Lifetime’s producers, directors and
writers seem to feel compelled to drag in.
