The most telling aspect of last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, I Almost Married a Serial Killer, was that the production company that made it for Lifetime distribution had the spookily appropriate name “Formula Features,” since the film hewed incredibly closely to the usual Lifetime formulae. At first I had thought the film would be about a woman who was courted by a serial killer and fell in love with him and agreed to marry him with no idea of what he did outside their relationship — I was even thinking of jokes like, “I thought everything was wonderful until I saw what he put on our wedding registry and it was all guns, knives and poisons” — but instead of that set of Lifetime clichés it turned out to be the set of Lifetime clichés in which the heroine, Camille (Krista Allen), barely escapes the clutches of the serial killer in the opening act (for someone who’s supposed to be experienced in murder he’s certainly bad enough at it the woman has an unbelievably easy time escaping!). She testifies against him at his trial and the judge announces she’s going to impose eight consecutive life sentences on him, once for each victim the police have been able to identify and charge him with, with no possibility of parole. Then she receives word from the FBI that he’s escaped from prison — like the real escapees from New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility Lifetime previously dramatized in the film New York Prison Break, he did so by sexually seducing a female guard and getting her to help him — and until he’s re-arrested the FBI is going to insist that Camille and her daughter Violet (Avra Friedman)[1] go into witness protection and relocate from their original home in Philadelphia to the decidedly fictional community of Willowbrook, California.
Violet is especially
upset with this because she’s about to complete her senior year in high school
and naturally doesn’t want to be uprooted from her community and cut off
overnight from all her friends, and Camille is equally upset because her father
is in a nursing home and she quite naturally wants to be around when he croaks.
But they go, and in the meantime the serial killer Camille almost married,
Rafael DuPont (Jeremy John Wells), visits a plastic surgeon and has his
appearance so dramatically reconstructed that when he emerges he’s played by an
entirely different actor —more on that later. Then he shoots the plastic
surgeon and burns down his chinic in hopes that he won’t be traced. Meanwhile,
Camille and her daughter find a large black-and-white dog on the street and use
the phone number on his collar to trace him back to his owner, Brian (Louis
Mandylor), creating a classic meet-cute in which Brian and Emily Collins
(Camille’s cover identity in witness protection) will start dating and
ultimately fall in love. The FBI continues to search for “The Hunter,” as he
calls himself, and his profile is that he first has to get his female victims
to fall in love with him so he can kill them as a sort of sick consummation —
though it’s ambiguous in Naomi L. Selfman’s script, directed and photographed
by Nadeem Soumah, whether he actually has to have sex with the woman before he
can kill her. In her new identity Emily nèe Camille finds herself being stalked by a mysterious
stranger in a black hoodie (not another mysterious stranger in a black hoodie!) who breaks into her home, only
Brian drives him away. She reports the crime to the local police and get him
arrested, but he’s able to talk them into releasing him by saying he’s not the
mysterious “Hunter” but is merely Colin (Adamo Palladino), a journalist trying
to expose him, get him arrested and promote the book he intends to write about
“the Hunter.”
Then [spoiler alert!]
we get a shot of Brian walking through his home and opening a closet on whose
walls he’s posted clippings of news articles about “the Hunter,” thereby
paralleling the similar shot we saw in the first act and thus revealing to us
that Brian is really “the Hunter” and he’s going to romance Camille so he can
have a second shot at her. No, it’s not that surprising a “twist,” especially to a hardened
Lifetime-movie watcher like me, and I found myself so resentful of the “cheat”
Formula Features’ casting people, uncredited on imdb.com, pulled by casting two
separate actors as DuPont pre-op and
post-op it was hard for me to enjoy the rest of the movie after absorbing such
a preposterous gimmick. (What they needed was an actor with the extraordinary
talent of Lon Chaney, Sr. in being able to concoct so many makeups for himself
he could appear as two dramatically different-looking people in the same movie
— but Chaney, Sr. died in 1930 and there haven’t been that many actors who’ve
developed that skill since. Another option would have been what writer-director
Delmer Daves did in the 1947 Bogart-Bacall vehicle Dark Passage: show all the scenes of DuPont pre-op from his point
of view so we never got to see, except in an insert close-up of a still photo,
what he looked like pre-op.) Camille and her daughter have an argument over a
camping trip the girl wants to go on — at first Camille says no but then the
FBI agents, who by now not only are aware DuPont changed his appearance via
plastic surgery but even have a pencil sketch, based on the eyewitness
testimony of a Black motel manager who remembers seeing DuPont check out, of
what he looks like now — advise Camille that her daughter will actually be
safer away from her house and in the company of a lot of other people. So she
agrees to let her daughter go, but in the meantime she’s missed the ride that
was supposed to take her to camp and Brian offers to drive her there.
Then he
takes a route she doesn’t recognize and has a flat tire along the way — and
we’re sure he’s going to kill the daughter, but in the end the daughter shows
up at camp safely and Camille finds her there when Brian urges her to go to the
campsite, collect her daughter and drive with him to a deserted mountain cabin
(not another Lifetime movie whose
climax takes place in a deserted mountain cabin!) owned by a friend of his. There he intends to go
through with his seduction and ultimately murder of Camille, but she catches on
finally when she sees the
engagement ring Brian offers when he proposes to her, and it’s exactly the same
ring DuPont gave her the night he tried to kill her. Of course he tries to kill
her once she’s accepted his proposal and declared that she loves him — he’s
also drugged the daughter and for a while I was wondering if he was going to
rape the daughter and kill both of them, ramping up the sick, kinky thrill he
gets from his actions, but he leaves the daughter alone (thank goodness for
microscopic mercies!) and when he tries to kill Camille, she manages to get his
knife away from him and stab him
with it instead. There isn’t anything really wrong with I Almost Married a Serial Killer but there isn’t much right about it, either: one has to wonder about what there
is in Camille’s character that makes her fall for the same sicko creep twice in the same movie, but writer Selfman couldn’t care
less about that. There’s also only the dimmest idea what Camille does for a
living; there’s an opening sequence showing her lecturing to a class about
writing mystery fiction (which led me to wonder whether it was going to end
with a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style
denouement in which the entire
movie would turn out to be the plot of her new mystery novel!), but the idea
that she could have studied crime enough to be able to write about it makes it
even harder to believe that she could be so naïve as to fall for DuPont’s
dubious charms once, let alone
twice. As I said as I started this review, the most remarkable thing about it
is that the producers called their studio “Formula Features,” thereby making it
obvious and proclaiming to the world that they were just going to exploit
Lifetime’s usual formulae, not try to do anything creative with them!
[1] — She’s called “Ashley” on the imdb.com cast list but
has a different name in the actual movie — that sometimes happens when the
filmmakers have changed a character name at the last minute.
