by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie was billed as a “premiere” but
it must have been shown somewhere before
since there were already five reviews of it on imdb.com, including one from a
viewer who said s/he couldn’t evaluate the movie because the music was so loud
it drowned out the dialogue. It was called My Stepfather’s Secret and was an O.K. movie within the Lifetime genre. It was a product of Michael Feifer’s production
company and, like a lot of his movies, dealt with a man who comes into a
relationship with a woman withholding a deep, dark secret — though we don’t
find out what the secret is until the very end of the movie and it’s something
of a surprise compared with the usual ones Lifetime’s writers cook up. (Feifer
directed this one personally and the script is by Stephen Lyons, though I
suspect Feifer, the producer as well as the director, pretty much dictated the
basic elements and left Lyons to flesh them out.) Bailey Kershaw (Paris Smith)
has just completed her freshman (freshperson?) year in college when she returns
home for the summer to her mother Tina (Vanessa Marcil — her last name sounds
like a drug you inhale to cure your sinuses from an attack of hay fever). The
main way we can tell mother and daughter apart is mom wears granny glasses —
the big ones with black frames that were briefly fashionable in the late 1960’s
and early 1970’s — and her hair is even longer and straighter than her
on-screen daughter’s.
Tina has been raising Bailey as a single parent since the
death of her father five years earlier — he was shot on a rooftop by the usual
hooded assailant in a prologue we’re shown even though its significance, as
usual with Lifetime, won’t be explained until the end — and judging from the
flashbacks we see of a young Bailey with her dad, it seems the biggest thing
her parents had in common was similarly bad eyes that required them to wear
those big glasses. When Bailey returns home she finds her mom in the middle of
an intense affair with a mysterious man named Hugo (Eddie McClintock, who’s so tall,
muscular and hunky — he’s working, or at least says he is, as a physical
trainer and his body is buff enough it’s believable — we hardened Lifetime
movie-watchers know instantly that he’s a villain), whom she’s passionately in
love with and wants to marry. (Writer Lyons carefully establishes that Hugo is
the first man Tina has shown any romantic or sexual interest in since the
mysterious death of her husband.) Bailey notices that Hugo seems to be taking
an unusual interest in her, and for a while I wondered if this plot was heading
towards Lolita territory (the
pedophile marries the mother just to get access to the daughter) or, even
worse, that he was a human trafficker who was going to murder Tina and sell
Bailey to a crime ring as a sex slave. At one point Hugo receives a shipment of
protein packs that blocks Bailey from getting her car out of the garage, so
Hugo lends her his car — and while driving it she’s accosted by a heavy-set
bald-headed thug type straight out of Cueball-meets-Luthor who seems disappointed
that it’s she and not Hugo driving.
Bailey also notices Hugo doing her laundry,
including carefully folding her underwear, which she and we both think is
“creepy.” Mom, of course, pleads with her daughter to give the new man in her
life a chance, while the daughter finds out that Hugo has hacked into the
computer in her room (a desktop model she inherited from her dad) and is using
its video camera to spy on her. Bailey hooks up with her former boyfriend
Anders (played by beautiful baby-faced Tanner Fontana, who probably had most of
whatever Gay male audience there is for Lifetime drooling) to do some computer
hacking of their own, and they finally discover that Bailey’s dad was involved
with a father-and-son team of Japanese computer geniuses to create an
international cryptocurrency, only their third partner — you guessed it, Hugo —
was upset about being frozen out and wanted to steal the $3.7 million Bailey’s
dad had accumulated in a secret fund. The money is encoded in a flash drive —
how’s that for a 21st
century MacGuffin? — but Hugo also needs the password set by Bailey’s late
father (whom Hugo shot when Bailey’s dad refused to tell it to him) to access
the fortune. It’s basically a high-tech version of Gaslight — for some reason the basic gimmick of a man
marrying a woman he doesn’t love to gain access to some physical possession
that will make him rich but she doesn’t know she has has become a popular trope
these days and is even referred to in screenwriting and filmmaking circles as
“gaslighting” — in which the secret treasure is not jewels or rare paintings
(as it was in Kind Lady, a film
that came even before Gaslight)
but something to do with computers and their increasing conquest of the world.
Spoiler
alert: It all ends at, you guessed it, a
deserted mountain cabin, formerly owned by Bailey’s dad but unused since his
death except when Bailey and her boyfriend Anders would go for a clandestine
rendezvous — where Bailey and her two girlfriends — including Fee (Dara Renee),
a Black girl Bailey met at college and whom Feifer and Lyons seemed to be
setting up for the Lifetime cliché role of the African-American best friend who
stumbles onto the villain’s plan but gets killed before she can reveal it to
the heroine, but is blessedly alive at the final credits — converge and get
trapped by Hugo, who’s overheard Bailey’s conversation to Anders and thus
learns where the flash drive is. Hugo threatens Bailey and Anders with a gun;
Anders clubs Hugo with a shovel but stupidly neglects to grab Hugo’s gun before
Hugo comes to, only Bailey gets the gun away from him and shoots him herself —
not fatally, however, because in the meantime Bailey’s mom Tina and her friend
Fee have called the police and they take Hugo alive, while a tag scene shows
Bailey reconciled with her mom (it helps that while Bailey and Hugo were
confronting each other, Bailey had her cell phone on with her mom at the other
end of the call, so Tina got to hear Hugo tell Bailey how repulsive he found it
that he had to sleep with Tina for his plot to work), her girlfriends alive and
well, and she and Anders giving each other a peck-like kiss to indicate that they’ve reconciled (earlier Bailey had broken up with Anders
because she’d hoped he’d go to the same college she did, and he didn’t want to
go to college at all). It’s an O.K. movie even though Michael Feifer is
unlikely to make anything again with the hallucinatory power of His
Secret Family (in which the shocking secret
the heroine learns about the villain is he’s a bigamist, she’s wife number two,
and with his finances having taken a hit in the recession he’s calmly planning
to eliminate the extra expense of a second family by bumping off both her and
their daughter — who, just to show how Michael Feifer can both ramp up the
tension and pull the
heartstrings, also suffers from a rare blood disease and only a bone-marrow
transplant from her father can treat her), and he checks off the Lifetime
cliché boxes and fills the cast with talented, workmanlike actors who play
their parts professionally but don’t bring much special to them.
