Last night Charles and I watched the latest Lifetime “premiere” movie — though the production date on imdb.com is 2018 and Charles thought from the opening scene at an outdoor yoga class that we’d seen it before (we hadn’t, but it was so imbued with the Lifetime clichés it seemed like we had) with the spectacular misnomer of a title Pregnant and Deadly. Apparently it was filmed under the working title Dying for a Baby, which would have been closer — it seems that in the run-up to Mother’s Day Lifetime is doing a lot of stories about crazy women who either are mothers or have a fixated desire to be — because the villainess in this one, Jessica Moore (Sara Minnich — yet another modern-day actress using a name which in the glory days of Hollywood would have been changed; as I’ve pointed out here before, no one at MGM in 1939 would have thought there was a market for “The Wizard of Oz, starring Frances Gumm”), not only isn’t really pregnant but can’t be. It seems that two years before the main action Jessica and her husband Dave (uncredited on imdb.com) were involved in a car crash with another couple, Amber (Christa B. Allen, top-billed) and Kyle (Grayson Berry, tall, lanky and with a homely face but a surprisingly ample basket of which we get a lot of nice look-sees from director Lauro David Chartrand-de Valle, whose last name sounds like an especially tasty French wine) Smith.
Jessica and Dave both survive the crash, but Jessica needs an emergency hysterectomy to save her life and this leads her to go off the deep end. She figures Amber “stole” her baby — she was pregnant at the time of the crash and had already found out the gender (male) and named him Jonathan — and therefore she’s entitled to grab Amber’s baby as soon as Amber and Kyle conceive one. In order to spy on them, she rents a detached garage as a living space from a neighbor of Amber’s and Kyle’s — a college student beats her to the rental but she solves that problem by killing her — and when Amber is finally expecting, Jessica moves in on her, offering to become her best friend and “help” her, while simultaneously seducing her gynecologist into letting him take a volunteer position at the hospital so she can keep herself abreast of Amber’s care and steal her baby just after it’s born. She even forges a paper and inserts it in Amber’s file saying that Amber is schizophrenic and this led her to give up her baby as soon as it was born. Amber and Kyle make their livings as co-owners of a yoga studio that holds classes both outdoors (weather permitting) and indoors, and of course Jessica — who’s independently wealthy from the accident and an inheritance she got immediately afterwards — takes classes at Amber’s studio and ostensibly befriends her. She also hires a mixed-race girl named Taylor (Sienna Noelle Peeples) who’s just acquired an unwanted fetus of her own; she offers to pay Taylor’s medical expenses in exchange for adopting her baby when it’s born, but then reneges on the deal (without bothering to tell Taylor) when she finds out Taylor’s baby-to-be is a girl (wrong gender because she wants a boy to replace the son she lost, and of course the Smiths’ baby-to-be is a boy).
About 45 minutes into the movie, a Black woman on the staff of Amber’s
and Kyle’s yoga studio stumbles onto the truth about Jessica’s plot but gets
killed for her pains — usually this doesn’t happen until two-thirds into the
running time of a Lifetime movie but the writers on this one, Lindsay Hartley[1]
and Jason Shane Scott, move the Heroine’s
African-American Best Friend Who Stumbles Onto the Villainess’s Plot but Gets
Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine cliché up quite a bit earlier
than usual. Indeed, the film starts with Amber coming to in her own home,
finding gas on in the kitchen without the flame burning, rescuing her comatose
husband Kyle who’d already been overcome by the gas fumes (after, we learn
later when this scene is repeated, being clobbered on the head by the bad
girl), and screaming when she finds an empty crib, “Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?” Then we get a title reading, “Eight months
earlier,” and the main part of the story begins — though writers Hartley and
Shane Scott were obviously worshiping at the shrine of St. Casey Robinson since
they then give us a few flashbacks within flashbacks, including a replay of the
accident from two years earlier (ya remember the accident from two
years earlier?) which turns out to be one
of the characters flashing back to it in a dream. It all ends up with Jessica
seducing Amber’s doctor, then giving him an injection of a knockout drug,
kidnapping him and then taking him to Amber’s place, where she forces him at
gunpoint to give Amber a drug to induce labor so Amber will give birth already
and Jessica can take the baby. (Like most kidnapped babies in Lifetime movies,
the kid screams his head off in crying when the bad girl holds him, but coos
softly when held by his actual biological mom.)
Once Amber comes to and
realizes what’s happened — including that Jessica has left the gas running in
their kitchen so she can asphyxiate both of them and the cops will see the note
in Amber’s medical chart Jessica planted there to say she was schizophrenic and
rule it a murder-suicide — she bounds from the bed with surprising energy and
traces Jessica and the baby; though the cops Amber had the good sense to call
(typically for Lifetime, it’s only at the very end of the movie that anyone has the good sense to use their ubiquitous cell
phones to call 911) arrive at the address Amber gives them, Amber arrives there
first, overpowers Jessica and regains her child, though Jessica is apprehended
alive and the final scene features Jessica in the courtyard of a mental
hospital, surrounded by all the extras Lifetime could hire to play florid
crazies, sitting and clutching a “baby” — obviously a doll, though the director
doesn’t get her camera close enough to confirm that. Pregnant and
Deadly (Charles joked the Lifetime titlers
should have taken the gimmick even further and called it Pregnant and
Deadly at 17 – to which I added, By
the Boy She Met Online!) is pretty much in
the middle range of Lifetime movies in quality: acceptably directed from a
script that relied even more on coincidence than most Lifetime plots, and
decently acted even though I’ve seen a lot of actors of both (mainstream)
genders do the Psycho from Hell roles considerably better than Sarah Minnich.
It’s the sort of movie you think
you’ve seen before even though you haven’t.
