by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Heaven I watched
another recent Lifetime movie, The Madam of Purity Falls, originally shot under just Purity Falls as the working title but for once a Lifetime title
change was an improvement: the irony of the words “madam” and “purity” in the
same title hits home and no doubt attracted audiences to this one. This was the
third week in a row Lifetime had advertised this film, and I’d missed it in its
previous go-rounds but I caught it this time. I’m glad I did; maybe to this Gay
male viewer one reason this seemed more fun than most Lifetime movies is that
the titular madam of Purity Falls, Courtney McQueen (a solid old-pro
performance by the still hot Olivia d’Abo) has a stable, not of young women, but young men: horny high-school students whose services she sells
to middle-aged matrons whose husbands are frequently away on “business trips”
(during which they’re no doubt engaging in extra-relational sexual shenanigans
of their own!). The central characters are the Johnson family: mom Nicole
(Kristanna Loken), high-school senior son Jason (Trevor Stines, a tall, wiry
but well-muscled man with eight-pack abs — I wish the guys in Gay porn looked
this good instead of the scrawny boyish types they cast!) and his younger
sister Justine (Sloane Avery). In the opening scene they’re a complete family,
but Nicole’s husband has a heart attack while playing catch football with Jason
and the Johnsons survive for a year, burning through their savings, until
Nicole gets a job heading the counseling department at Purity Falls High School.
She uses her remaining savings to buy a house in town that just happens to be
right across the street from Courtney McQueen’s. Courtney introduces herself,
brings over some lasagna to welcome the Johnsons to the neighborhood, and she’s
also got a hot young man named Chad Griffiths (Jonathan Bouvier) watering the
lawn on her grounds. At first both we and the Johnsons assume Chad is
Courtney’s son, but then they walk off with their arms around each other’s
waists in what’s obviously a more sexual than paternal gesture. In the next
scene a mysterious figure confronts Chad in a swimming pool and drowns him in
it.
We also get an establishing scene in which we learn the writers (Anthony
Del Negro, Shane O’Brien and Jack Bryant) and Sam Irvin, who directed, are worshipers
at the shrine of St. Anton Chekhov, who once decreed that if you introduced a
gun in act one it had to go off in act three. In this case the gun is Papa
Johnson’s old hunting rifle, which Jason took with them when they moved because
he figured it was part of his inheritance — and his sister Justine told him
they should just throw away. Like a classical recruiting pimp both in Lifetime
movies and in real life, Courtney wins Jason over to her stable by seducing him
herself. Then she offers him a job as a “landscaper,” and gives him an odd
document — a psychedelically designed visiting card with an address but no
phone number and the name “Karen” — as Jason’s first “client.” Karen, of
course, is interested in Jason for other reasons than getting her weeds pulled
— and there’s a bit of a glitch in the writing in that Jason shows up to her
place in shorts and carrying a couple of plastic buckets but none of the tools
(like shovels, shears and rakes) we’d expect him to have if he were really
doing landscaping, or thought that’s what he was there for. She comes on to
Jason, he bolts, and she calls Courtney to complain that her boy didn’t render
the services she was expecting from him. Jason doesn’t want to become a paid
boy-toy of rich married women, but Daniel (Anthony Matthew Welch), his friend
from the school wrestling team (and yes, we get a lot of hot shots of the boys on it grappling each other
— yum!), who’s also one of the boys in Courtney’s stable, talks him into
continuing even though Jason sees a scene of an older man breaking into the
team’s locker room and threatening Daniel. Courtney then bribes Jason by
offering him her husband’s old car but pointing out that he’ll need an income
to fuel and maintain it, and he agrees to become one of her gigolos.
His first
client is a local judge named Tiffany (Katherine Morgan) who peremptorily
orders him to take off his clothes, one garment at a time, then tells him to do
the same to her. Jason lasts for a while but worries because Courtney is
sending him on so many dates his schoolwork is suffering because he has no time
to study, and also because his mom is giving him the third degree every time he
comes home late from one of them. At one point he has a crisis of conscience
and tells Courtney he won’t do it anymore — and Courtney sends her “enforcer,”
Benjamin Carr (Kendall Ryan Sanders), to confront him in the locker room
(Purity Falls High School seems to have the least secure locker room of any
American high school!), wave a knife at his neck and threaten that if Jason
doesn’t keep working for Courtney he’ll do unspeakably mean things to his
sister. Meanwhile Courtney is building up an impressive reputation around town
and the age-peer guy who wants to be her boyfriend wins her the title of Purity
Falls Entrepreneur of the Year, only at a banquet party held at Courtney’s home
to celebrate this honor mom Nicole spots one of Courtney’s friends with one of
her young-boy bits of merchandise having at it in a bedroom and tries to forbid
her son from seeing Courtney again. Meanwhile, Jason accidentally left his belt
behind at Karen’s place and Karen’s husband Bill (John Newburg), the older guy
who threatened Daniel in the locker room, found it, put two and two together,
and said he was going to divorce her and invoke the terms of their pre-nup by
which if she cheated on him she gets absolutely nothing. Karen demands $100,000
from Courtney in blackmail money, but Courtney sends Benjamin to kill Karen —
then kills Benjamin herself after Karen, using her husband’s gun, wounded him
while he was strangling her.
The climax — in more ways than one — occurs at
Courtney’s home, where Jason has been invited for a “special date” with
Courtney and her age-peer boyfriend, in which it seems that they want to do S/M
with him (Jason spots some leather toys on the bed when he arrives) and also
that Courtney’s boyfriend wants to pop Jason’s Gay cherry. He rebels and gets
manacled to a work bench in Courtney’s garage, where it seems she’s going to
eliminate him, only in the meantime mom Nicole and sister Justine have figured
out what’s going on and where Jason is. They manage to overpower Courtney and
knock her out, but like the usual typical stupid Lifetime heroes they don’t
bother to grab Courtney’s gun, so she’s able to retrieve it and it looks like
Courtney’s going to shoot both Jason and his mom dead when sister Justine shows
up with her dad’s hunting rifle (ya remember her dad’s hunting rifle?) and takes out Courtney before she can render
Justine an orphan. The Madam of Purity Falls had a lot
of hot-looking young men and a lot of lubricious soft-core porn scenes between
them and Courtney’s clients — after a while this film was starting to turn me on! — and when it wasn’t offering titillation (or,
more accurately, dickillation — I’m sure a lot of Lifetime’s core audience
members wished there’d be a service like Courtney’s in their neighborhoods!) it was offering a smooth, relatively
coherent, fast-moving and entertaining run-through of the Lifetime formula with
the all-important difference that this time it was young men, not young women, being turned into sexual
commodities by the titular villainess.
