by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the
latest Lifetime movie, The Wrong Teacher, which was billed as a “premiere” even though the
date for it on imdb.com was 2018, not 2019, and it already had a review on
imdb.com. The review was headlined “Meh” and was by someone or something named
“zachnnobo,” who wondered, “[H]ow
does Vivica Fox keep getting work!?? Her plastic face and stiff acting is [sic]
unwatchable.” Easy: not only is she good at playing the imperturbable
African-American authority figure in the dramatis personae whose task it is to save the white characters from
their stupidities, she’s also one of the eight listed producers on the film —
as is David DeCoteau, its director, whose name I’ve seen other places, mostly
on other “Wrong” Lifetime movies like The Wrong Cruise and The Wrong Friend. Working from a script by Robert Dean Klein, The
Wrong Teacher might more accurately have
been called The Wrong Student, since it begins with the titular teacher visiting the City Lights
Bookstore (which I found jarring since the only real bookstore I know of with
that name is the legendary one in San Francisco, and the extreme long-shots
DeCoteau gave to establish his city’s geography were of an unending flatness,
obviously not the terrain of famously
hilly San Francisco!). Her name is Charlotte Hanson (Jessica Morris), and she’s
currently on the outs with her independent photographer boyfriend Scott
(Jason-Shane Scott). She teaches English literature to seniors at Roosevelt
High School and in her spare time she’s trying to write a romance novel about a
young widow in love with an older man, but she’s blocked on it.
So she goes to
City Lights one night and there meets Chris Williams (Philip McElroy, a darkly
handsome young man whose great looks and skillful acting should make him a future star). She’s impressed that
someone that young is actually hanging around a physical bookstore instead of
either not reading at all or ordering everything from amazon.com. She’s also
turned on by him, and they go out drinking at a bar called Blue (which seems to
be the only bar in the entire city, though that’s obviously because it was the
only set the production company, Hybrid LLC, could afford to build) and then
end up having sex in — of all places — her classroom at the high school. Then
school starts the next day and Charlotte is shocked that her previous night’s
kinky paramour is also one of her new students. He assures her that he’s just
turned 18 and therefore at least she isn’t in danger of being prosecuted for
statutory rape, but even though she didn’t know she was getting fucked by one of her students when
it happened, she’s still liable to be fired and disgraced. Chris demands more
from her, and when she makes it clear that she isn’t going to have sex with him
again he seeks his revenge. Charlotte is inspired by her hot night with Chris
to reconcile with Scott and practically rapes him at his studio — the two
soft-core porn scenes of Charlotte having sex first with Chris and then with
Scott are among this film’s greatest delights, even though one wonders if this
woman ever makes love in a bed! Then
Scott is hanging out at Blue waiting for Chris — Chris has posed as a young
rich software guy interested in buying some of his art photos — when a
dark-haired woman he’s never seen before approaches him and kisses him. He
assures her that he’s not the guy she was waiting for, but in the meantime
Chris, lurking in the back of the bar just out of Scott’s eyeshot, has
photographed the whole thing with his smartphone and sent the photos to
Charlotte, who responds predictably by dumping Scott all over again.
Charlotte
and Chris are overheard in one of their confrontations by the school’s
vice-principal, Clark (Eric Roberts, who’s recently done two Lifetime movies
playing the psycho in his own right, Stalked by My Doctor and Stalked by My Doctor: The Return, and is quite good here in his current, rather
seedy state and exits way too soon), who deduces that Charlotte and Chris have something secret and untoward going on between them. He
threatens to report them to the principal and have Charlotte disciplined and
Chris transferred, but that doesn’t happen because Chris overhears him and
strangles him, somehow making it seem like Clark committed suicide because he
was still broken up over the death of his wife the previous year. Then, in a
class during which Charlotte is supposed to be streaming the movie of Romeo
and Juliet from the school’s library
server as part of the course during which she’s teaching her students the play,
Chris has managed to hack into the system so he can show the secret sex tape he
filmed of himself and Charlotte having sex in the classroom (though we wonder
how he could possibly have filmed it — the point of view would have required
him to set up his smartphone on a tripod and conceal it behind something, which
would have meant he’d had access to the room before he and Charlotte got
there), and so not only do the students in Charlotte’s class get to see her and
her hottest student humping each other on her teacher’s desk, so do the
administrators, including Ms. Burns (the ubiquitous Vivica Fox), who was
Clark’s assistant and is now acting vice principal. Ms. Burns tells Charlotte
she’s suspended without pay until the case is resolved, and Charlotte decides
to investigate Chris’s background herself. Her first step is to go to
Washington High School, where he was a student before he transferred to
Roosevelt for his senior year (apparently Chris only gets to go to schools
named after Presidents — was he planning, after his graduation, to attend Trump
University?) — and as soon as she shows up at the Washington campus and gets
past the usual I-can’t-violate-confidentiality crap, she’s asked, “Did you sleep
with him?”
Apparently Chris has made it a habit of seducing all his teachers — or at least the ones with blonde
hair — which began when his parents died when he was 4. He was run through
various foster homes and was all too aware that the adults raising him regarded
him only as a paycheck … until he got to first grade, where his teacher, Ms. Martin, who looked and
sounded just like Charlotte except she wore her hair in a ponytail and spoke
with a Southern accent, became the first person since his parents died to show
a genuine interest in him. Klein’s script doesn’t come right out and say Ms.
Martin molested him as well, though it seems likely because when he “aged out”
of her class he went on to seduce every teacher he had who looked like her. The
business that in getting his teachers to have sex with him Chris is reproducing
the one pleasant memory of his childhood (however distorted it may have been)
is a nice bit of Christine Conradt-style narrative and dramatic complexity
writer Klein gives Chris’s character — it’s good to see a Lifetime movie where
we get at least some clue as
to what makes the villain “run” instead of seeing him (or her) as just an
amoral monster — and it also helps that Philip McElroy is a good enough actor
that he can change his facial expressions and overall mien depending on whether
Klein is depicting the character as a full-fledged adult aged beyond his years
by his traumatic childhood, a relatively normal high-school student or someone
who’s reverted even further. At the end Chris has kidnapped and drugged
Charlotte’s roommate and best friend Maddie (Akari Endo — that’s right, this
time the heroine’s person-of-color best friend is Asian, not Black!) and has
also sneaked into Scott’s photo studio, clubbed him and stolen his gun. Chris
confronts Charlotte and says she has to go with him and be his lover or he’ll
kill Maddie. Charlotte puts her hair in a ponytail and poses as Ms. Martin to
subdue Chris, and while she’s doing that Maddie recovers enough to get the gun
he dropped in their confrontation and wound him.
In the sort of tag scene
Lifetime’s “premiere” the previous night, The Killer Downstairs, blessedly dispensed with, after a scene showing
Charlotte and Scott reaffirming their relationship and planning to marry, we
cut to Chris in a hospital for the criminally mentally ill, whose management
has made the mistake of assigning him a blonde-haired woman therapist whom he’s
fixating on — director DeCoteau even copies the famous close-up shot of Anthony
Perkins smiling at his keepers towards the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho — and then we cut to another scene of Charlotte doing a book signing at City
Lights, since her experience with Chris inspired her to flip the ages of the
leads in her novel, make it a story of an older woman obsessively pursued by a
younger man, and she not only finished it, it became a best-seller. Like The
Killer Downstairs, The Wrong Teacher is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie, skillfully directed
by DeCoteau from an unusually complex and ambiguous script by Klein, and driven
by an utterly haunting performance from Philip McElroy. Lifetime has churned
out enough of these superficially charming psychos by now that the template for
them has become well worn, but rarely has one caught both the surface appeal
and the deep-seated psychopathology of one of these characters as well as
McElroy has. I can only hope there are enough casting directors at major
studios who watch Lifetime movies so they can give this quite compelling (as
well as very hot-looking!) actor the
opportunities he deserves.
