by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie, Hometown Killer (shot under the more ambiguous but also more
sinister title A Killer Is Watching),
was an unusually good product of Ken Sanders’ factory — he wrote the story, his
frequent collaborator J. Bryan Dick wrote the screenplay and Jeff Hare directed
— that achieved some of the moral ambiguity Christine Conradt has in her Lifetime scripts. The story is set in a California
(I think) small town and begins with a burglar wearing a ski mask and black
clothes — and looking pretty jittery in ways I suspect were supposed to
indicate he was a drug addict looking for cash for a quick score — breaking
into the home of Tara (Kaitlyn Black) while her husband Charles (Jon Prescott)
is still working a late-night shift. The burglar overpowers Tara just as she’s
placed a 911 call but before she’s had a chance to talk to the receptionist,
but the police get a readout on the address from which the call was placed and
send officer Penny (Ashley Gallegos) and her African-American partner Miller
(Chris Devlin) to respond. Penny shoots down the burglar and kills him, but the
incident has awakened Proust-like remembrances of things past: it seems she
grew up in that small town and she and Tara were friends in high school until
Tara decided to hang out with the cool kids in general and her boyfriend Nolan
(Will Greenburg) in particular. On the night of the seniors’ talent show Nolan
and his “buddies” literally kidnapped Penny, tied her to a chair, painted clown
makeup on her face, gagged her with a sock, and pushed her on stage in that
guise to humiliate her. They also called her “Pig Penny” and used that nickname
to bully her throughout her time in high school.
Penny left the small town for
a larger city within the same county, trained as a police consultant to solve
computer crimes, then decided she wanted the action of actual police work, went
through the police academy and qualified as a full-fledged cop. She did well in
that work and got decorated … until the administrators of her department
decided to reassign her to the small town where she grew up. The experience of
re-meeting Tara brings back memories of her high-school humiliation and she
determines to exact her revenge on the perpetrators, especially after she gets
invited to the 20th anniversary reunion of her high school class on
Tara’s insistence that Nolan (played as an adult by Kelly Marcus, tall with
close-cropped blond hair and by far the sexiest guy in the film) won’t be
invited. Nolan shows up anyway and the classmates re-enact her “Pig Penny”
humiliation. Penny starts her revenge plot by pulling Nolan’s car over for a
nonexistent traffic violation, forcing him out of the car and then kneecapping
him with her metal baton until he admits Tara invited him to the reunion (which
she didn’t, by the way). Her ultimate plan is to murder Tara’s husband Charles
and frame her for the crime, and among other things she tells Tara that Charles
is having an affair with his assistant Lanie (Jensen Bush) and that’s the real reason he’s “working” so many late nights with her.
She even shoots her own partner Miller when he catches on to her scheme — he
survives but has no memory of how or by whom he got shot — and she finally
corners Nolan and Tara at the high school where all this started 20 years ago
and tells Tara either she turns herself in for her husband’s (attempted) murder
or Penny will simply kill her. Fortunately, the other cops have caught on and
sent Nolan into the scene with a body camera; Nolan is shot but before that
he’s recorded enough to establish Penny’s guilt and, much to my surprise, she’s
arrested alive instead of being shot down by her fellow cops at the end.
What
makes Hometown Killer unusually
good for something on Lifetime — especially from Ken Sanders, whose specialty
is stories about nubile young women prostituting themselves to get enough money
to go to Whittendale University — is the moral ambiguity; we sympathize with
Penny as a bullying victim even while we hate her for her twisted revenge
campaign, and we see Tara as an innocent victim but also a bitch who coldly
dismissed her friend and joined (though she says she tried to stop it, and the
flashbacks we see are ambiguous on the point) the bizarre humiliation the “cool
kids” in school wreaked upon her. It also helps that Ashley Gallegos is so sexy
in her black leather uniform — she makes Mariska Hargitay on Law and
Order: Special Victims Unit look like Mama
Cass by comparison — and when she complains that she can’t find a boyfriend
because all the men she meets are just attracted by the kinky thrill of doing a
cop, we believe her. It’s also unusually well directed for a Lifetime movie;
Jeff Hare has obviously studied the 1940’s film noir classics and stages this script that way,
emphasizing its similarities to The Prowler (a 1951 film directed by Joseph Losey — the last
movie he made in the U.S. before being blacklisted and fleeing to Britain —
which stars Van Heflin as a cop who goes bad after he answers a prowler call at
the home of the wife of an all-night D.J., falls for her and hatches a scheme
to kill her husband and make it look like an accident), though it’s probably
just as well Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick did not build their script around an illicit sexual
attraction. We like Penny, we pity her and we hate her, and at the same time we also hate the circumstances that
unlocked the evil inside her, first by making her a bullying victim and then
bringing her back to the town where she was bullied and bringing all those
memories home to her.
