by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie was one of the worst things I’ve
ever seen on the network, partly because it dealt with the world of fashion
(which I find profoundly uninteresting — just where does anybody actually wear the preposterously ugly clothes frequently exhibited
at haute couture fashion shows?)
and partly because it was so
by-the-numbers an example of the Lifetime formula it failed to bring anything new to it, the way Lifetime practitioners like
writer Christine Conradt and director Vanessa Parise have done in previous
productions for the network. This film was shown under the title My
Killer Client, though according to imdb.com
it was shot under the more evocative name Killer in a Red Dress, and it was directed by Lisa France (not a credit
that will help the cause of women directors any) from a script ostensibly
“written” by Shanrah Wakefield but really just compiled from Lifetime clichés.
The film opens with a scene set outside a high school that’s getting ready for
its prom — though the scene takes place in broad daylight — and we see, at
least from the waist down, a woman in a ghastly red dress approaching a group
of high-school kids waiting for their prom to begin. The woman in the ghastly
red dress is Kitty Niven (Emmy James) and she’s there to confront Jake Walsh
(Jacob Osborne), her former boyfriend whom she’s still in love with even though
he dumped her because he thought she was crazy. The confrontation between them
gets so angry that Jake ends up trying to strangle Kitty and her life is saved
only when his friends pull him off her. Cut.
Then the scene jumps forward
several years (without Lifetime’s usual chyron to tell us how many years) and introduces the central character, Christa
(Tammin Sursok, the sort of name that in classic Hollywood got changed — as
I’ve pointed out in these pages before, no one at MGM in 1939 would have
thought there was an audience for “The Wizard of Oz, starring Frances Gumm”). Christa is a personal
shopper and free-lance fashion consultant, though she does so much hanging-out
at a preposterous high-end store called “Frocks & Rocks” — an indication
that they sell both clothes and jewelry — at first I got the impression that
she worked there. The main reasons she hangs out there are the place’s owner,
Lindsay (Donna Feldman, who stands out if only because she’s playing just about
the only character we actually like),
is her best friend and it’s a good location for her to meet potential
personal-shopping clients. Christa is also living with an older (and, I
thought, considerably hunkier) Jake Walsh than the one we met in the prologue —
he’s played by a different actor, Greg Perrow, who aside from his hair having
gone grey earlier is hard to identify as an older version of the same person as
Jacob Osborne is he’s a head taller and considerably more butch. (He’s hot
enough I welcomed the scene in which he and Christa go swimming in their pool
and we got to see him in swim trunks and nothing else — yum!).
Then Kitty
Niven, now calling herself “Kat Niven” and, like Jake, played by a different
actor, Allison Paige, re-enters the action, showing up at Frocks & Rocks
and hiring Christa to make her look stylish. Christa and Jake are living
together and engaged to be married — indeed, they’re planning their wedding and
Lindsay is helping them — and it’s only about one-third of the way through the
movie that writer Wakefield and director France finally let us know that the
“Kat” and “Jake” we’re seeing now are the older incarnations of the people who
confronted each other so bitterly in the prologue. The film goes through an
embarrassingly boring series of confrontations and scenes in which Christa is
first lulled into a growing friendship with Kat (just when we’re beginning to
wonder how Kat can afford to buy
all the stuff Christa is picking up for her, we’re told that she’s the heiress
of a fabulously wealthy and influential man named Aaron, though where his fortune came from remains a mystery), though that
doesn’t stop her from shoplifting a pair of earrings from Frocks & Rocks
just because she can. Lindsay, Frocks & Rocks’ owner (remember?), goes to
Kat’s home (how does she know where it is?) to confront her and get the
merchandise back; she stumbles on the truth about her — including her
incarceration in a mental institution after that killer prom date — but ends up
playing the Lifetime formula role of Heroine’s
Best Friend Who Discovers the Villainess’s Plot but Gets Killed for Her Pains.
Much of the action centers around a hot-looking red dress which Christa had
made for herself and insists is the only one of its kind in the world (and for
the straight guys in the audience it sure does a good job of showing off Tammin
Sursok’s tits) and which Kat wants as part of her bizarre plot to take over
from Christa in Jake’s life and win his love at long last. Kat tricks a rather
clueless salesgirl at Frocks & Rocks into giving her the red dress by
passing herself off as Christa — one aggravating factor about this movie is
Tammin Sursok and Allison Paige look so much alike it’s not always easy to tell
which is which, but this scene indicates that was a deliberate choice of the
filmmakers since this plot point depends on the two women looking sufficiently
similar one could easily impersonate the other — and she plans to make a grand
appearance at a fashion show being given by Jake’s parents at a venue Kat has
donated as a benefit for a charity she’s started to help the mentally ill. Only
before the event she decides to eliminate a few loose ends by going to Frocks
& Rocks and shooting Christa there — she also intends to dump Lindsay’s
body there (we’re supposed to believe she’s been carting it around with her for
two days?) and fake the scene to
make it look like both were killed by burglars whom they caught breaking into
the shop. Kat duly shoots Christa, but Christa is merely wounded, not killed, and preposterously she’s able to make
it to the fashion show and rescue Jake just as Kat, realizing at long last Jake
will never love her, plans to kill him instead. Christa is taken into custody,
and fortunately Wakefield did not
put in one of the annoying epilogues they’ve become prone to of late in which
the psycho bitch bides her time in a mental institution and plots her revenge.
That’s about all the positive stuff I can say about this ridiculous movie,
which even for Lifetime manages to reach a level of demented silliness
unredeemed by any hint of a depiction of how real people behave.
