by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched two Lifetime movies on last night, a “premiere” of
something called Fatal Getaway (the
working title was Scare B&B,
an obvious pun on the name of the airbnb Web site, which would have worked
better than the one they went with, since I had thought it would be the story
of an innocent young couple who ended up being taken hostage by an escaping
criminal) and a repeat of a film called Psycho Grandma. Psycho Grandma was as silly as you’d expect from the title but Fatal
Getaway, despite the misleading title — the
“getaway” is actually a weekend four female friends plan to spend together at a
beach rental in Biscayne Park (presumably in Florida, though that’s not
specified in the script by James S. “Jamie” Brown) — turned out to be a quite
good and tough thriller. The four friends are dark-haired Eliza Moore (Christie
Burson) — the only one we ever
get a last name for, and that not until the end — who’s just coming out of an
abusive relationship with a man named Steve (we hear his voice in a message he
left on her voicemail but never see him, which is probably just as well); two
interchangeable white blondes named Bridgette (Karlee Edwards) and Vicki (Laura
Ault) — one of these is an heiress from a super-rich family and one is a married
woman with two kids — and the token African-American, Monica (Shein
Mompremier), who I assumed was being set up for the role of the heroine’s Black
best friend who learns the villain’s plans but is killed by the villain before
she can warn the heroine.
The four are uniting for one last weekend together
before the demands of families and jobs send them on their separate ways, and
they decide to do that at a handsomely equipped villa owned by James (Tilky
Jones, the drop-dead gorgeous Lifetime actor whose characters seem to be
getting worse with each film). The villa is at an out-of-the-way location, and
though it’s on the beach it’s far enough away from any cell-phone towers that
the girls don’t get any reception there. The house is wired up to James’s computer
system and it’s outfitted so that you can tell the house to do just about
anything you want — open, close, lock or unlock doors; start your shower water
and adjust its temperature; start music playing; and open James’s private Wi-Fi
connection so you can still get on the Internet and communicate with the
outside world even though there’s no regular cell service — with voice commands
to its controlling computer. The moment we hear that we just know, based on previous Lifetime movies (can you say Tiny House
of Terror?), that at some point, either by
accident or because the villain is making them do that, the house control
mechanisms will malfunction and one or the other of the tenants will be
subjected to doors that won’t open and showers that are so hot they threaten to
scald her to death.
What’s more annoying, they won’t have privacy: James is
going to be staying with them during the entire duration of their stay at his
home. This particularly annoys Eliza because she really wanted an all-women
gathering since she’s just coming out of an abusive relationship and was hoping
for a weekend entirely without men around, but she goes along with it and
ultimately she’s the one who’s
subjected to the locked bedroom door that won’t open and the shower that runs
hot enough to scald her and won’t turn itself down when she tries to instruct
it to. The girls also find that they’re being watched by a neighbor of James’s
named Hector (Fedor Steer), who’s not only keeping an eye on them outside
James’s house but also has the inside of the place bugged (albeit rather crudely with video cameras that
produce only blurry black-and-white images) and is keeping an eye on the four
girls and taking notes on them. At this point we hardened Lifetime-movie
watchers could see three possible directions in which Jamie Brown and director
Damián Romay could be taking us: 1) James is really a black-hearted villain and
Hector is an undercover police officer trying to take him down before he
completes his latest scheme; 2) James is really a nice guy we only think is a villain because Lifetime’s usual iconography is
to cast nice-looking guys as black-hearted villains, and Hector the creepy
stalker is the real bad guy; or
3) James and Hector are both
evil, and whatever the plot is they’re in it together. The truth turns out to
be #1, albeit with modifications — Hector isn’t an official police officer
working undercover but a free-lance spy; and the official police officer in
Biscayne Park, at least the one we see, is Officer Martin (Antoni Corone), and
James has bought his loyalty through regular deliveries of bagels to the local
police station.
Eliza, who’s clearly the smartest — or at least the least dumb — of the
four, discovers a pendant with a quartz stone under the dresser in her bedroom
and later recognizes it as the same pendant shown on the picture of Jennifer
Garner (Anja Akstin) on a poster advertising her mysterious disappearance and
asking anyone with information about her to come forward. James tells Eliza
that Jennifer was a former vacation renter from Hector until she got antsy
about him and moved into James’s place for the last day of her weekend getaway,
but Hector hunts down Eliza and the member of the foursome she’s jogging with.
Hector tells them he’s never done
a vacation rental of his home, but he’s got suspicious of James and what
happened not only to Jennifer but to four other girls who mysteriously
disappeared right after they stayed with James. Eliza gets more suspicious of
James when the quartz pendant mysteriously disappears from her room and turns
up in James’s office, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie we finally learn what’s going on. It turns out James is a
recruiting agent for a gang of human traffickers who kidnap American women and
sell them to wealthy customers all over the world for use as sex slaves —
though it was my understanding that most real-life human traffickers selling
sex slaves look for women (or men) in their teens rather than the
twenty-somethings shown in this film. We learn this when a mysterious man named
Rio (Patrick Michael Buckley) calls James to inquire about the status of the
four “assets” he currently has at the house, and for a while it’s an open
question as to whether James is going to kidnap our decidedly non-fantastic
four heroines and sell them as per plan or just kill them and write them off as
a loss.
Brown’s screenplay has the big climax occur with about a half-hour of
running time left to go and he has to work overtime to keep the film going long
enough for Lifetime’s two-hour time slot, but he manages a quite spectacular
exit for James: he’s in the house’s big swimming pool when Eliza, carrying a
knife from his kitchen, dives into the pool and stabs him fatally. (Sunset
Boulevard meets Psycho.) Officer Martin finally realizes what was going on and announces he’ll
relaunch his investigation into Jennifer and the other missing girls to see if
they can be recovered and rescued from their enslavers. Fatal Getaway suffers from the predictability of the Lifetime
formula of late, but it’s also a crackling-tough thriller and director Romay
shows himself quite adept at both Gothic atmosphere and suspense. It’s also
capably acted, especially by Tilky Jones, who’s become quite adept at this
superficially charming young man in a glorious bod (with a quite impressive
tattoo on his left arm — I’ve seen this in his previous movies and I wonder if
it’s real, not the henna makeup job I’d assumed before) with a black heart
underneath (though the first time I saw him on Lifetime, in Open
Marriage, he wasn’t a villain but the
rather befuddled husband who goes along with his best friend’s invitation for
him and his wife to explore the sexual underground). The women are more
problematical because, except for Christie Burson (who’s quite good), they
don’t have really well-defined characters to play: they’re just four damsels in
distress whom we get to see a lot of in shorts and shirts open about halfway
down, in one of Lifetime’s periodic attempts to get straight guys to watch their channel. Still, Fatal
Getaway has enough variations on the usual
Lifetime formulae, and is sufficiently well plotted and staged (and offers this
old queen plenty of delectable look-sees at Tilky Jones’ hot bod, as unclad as
they could get away with on basic cable!) to rank a cut or two above their
normal output.
