by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After In Bed with a Killer Lifetime rebroadcast a movie they “premiered” a week or two ago after
heavily promoting it: Trapped Model,
originally shot as A Model Kidnapping (neither a particularly good title), set in Florida (it starts in
Biscayne Bay but mostly takes place in Miami) and actually produced by a
Florida-based outfit called Sunshine Films in association with our old friends,
MarVista Entertainment, who also distributed In Bed with a Killer. This time our “pussy in peril” (to use Maureen
Dowd’s description of the Lifetime formula) is Grace Somerville (Lucy Lokan), a
pretty but not especially gorgeous young woman who’s just graduated from high
school. Her mom Megan (Kiki Harris, a blonde who doesn’t look much like the
dark-haired woman supposedly playing her daughter) is after Grace to attend
college, but Grace wants to be a model and in an early scene she answers an ad
for a photographer who’s willing to shoot pictures of her for a price so she
can have a portfolio. Only the photographer turns out to be the typical letch
who wants Grace to get naked on camera so he can have his wicked way with her —
though when he points out that a lot of superstars got their starts posing for
naked pics, of course I couldn’t help but agree with him: I said, “Does the
name ‘Marilyn Monroe’ mean anything to you?” (Of course, Grace could have come
back, “You mean a pathetic drug addict who died at 36? No, thank you.”) The
point of this scene is obviously to let us know that Grace will do almost anything to make it as a model, and to establish
that she’s vulnerable to sleazy approaches but too “moral” a girl to follow
through on photographers or agents who make sexual demands on her.
Enter the
villain of the piece: Hunter Kelly (Wes McGee), a young, charismatic man who
places ads on modeling Web sites offering young women contracts to model for
him, with all expenses paid and a “model’s apartment” thrown in free for them
to stay in while they work for him. Grace answers the ad and is told to go to
Miami and meet Nicole (Katherine Diaz), Hunter’s assistant, who will drive her
to Hunter’s home in a remote location outside Miami where the photo shoots will
take place, and then take her back to the “model’s apartment” afterwards. Only,
as we already suspect and Grace soon learns, there is no “model’s apartment”;
instead Grace is tricked into staying in a room in Hunter’s home that’s locked
from the outside (electronically), with heavy-duty plastic windows so she can’t
break out, and what Hunter means to do is shoot her in a series of increasingly
pornographic videos which he’ll post online for subscribers. He tells her that
a lot of his former models are now big successes in Europe or Asia — a line in
Andrea Canning’s script (directed quite effectively by Damián Romay, whose work
I’ve seen before in the Lifetime movie Secrets in Suburbia) that hints that when he’s done with his kidnap
victims he traffics them, selling them to rich men either as one-on-one sex
slaves or prostitutes — though the truth is even more sinister: he simply kills
them, photographs their corpses and presumably buries them on his estate. The
good guys in this one are Grace’s mom Megan and Grace’s boyfriend Mark Harding
(Seth Goodfellow), whose rugged good looks are a nice contrast to Wes McGee’s
smarmy charms even though some of the body language between him and Kiki Harris
suggests that he’s about to transfer his affections from the missing daughter
to the very present mom.
Like In Bed with a Killer, Trapped Model is pretty much cut to the usual Lifetime formula — a card in the opening
credits claims it’s inspired by a true story (and I can all too easily believe
that!), but if so it’s, as my husband Charles said about the film Shine, a true story the filmmakers selected because the
real events came so close to movie clichés. But it’s also got some distinctive
touches; Canning, like Christine Conradt, is miles above most Lifetime writers
in creating multidimensional characters and hanging some real flesh on these
clichéd bones, and in Wes McGee director Romay and casting director Ellen
Jacoby came up with an actor for the villain who’s cute, charming, sensitive
and attractive enough one can see why women, especially naïve girls like Grace,
fall for him and are so easily lured by him. (I can see him taking over the
Leonardo di Caprio roles now that di Caprio is aging out of them.) The two
women are also powerfully dramatized by Canning and brought to life by the
actresses playing them: Canning keeps us in suspense as to whether Grace’s
sexual overtures to Kelly are genuine examples of the Stockholm syndrome or
ruses she adopts to gain more privileges and eventually escape. And in some
respects Nicole is the most interesting figure of the three: genuinely in love
with Kelly, jealous of his growing interest in Grace, and also surprisingly
shocked when she realizes that her lover has been killing off his kidnap
victims once he has no use for them instead of sending them home, as she had
naïvely believed. Like Wanda Barzee in the Elizabeth Smart case, Nicole is the
most dramatically ambiguous character in the piece — we feel sorry for her
horrendously wrong choice of a man and at the same time we hate her for being
his enabler as well as his enforcer (after one of Grace’s failed escape
attempts Kelly decides to punish her by having Nicole whip her and
livestreaming the event to his subscribers).
The good guys stumble onto the bad
guys’ secrets when Mark and his college roommate, an excellent computer hacker
played by a drop-dead gorgeous Black actor regrettably unidentified (yet) on
imdb.com, stumble on the livecast of Nicole whipping Grace. Only Kelly notices
that someone out of his subscriber list has logged on and forces Grace to make
a phone call to Mark to say that she’s all right but is happy with her new life
and never wants to see him again. She ends the call saying “I love you,” a
giveaway that she’s making the call under duress since she never used those
words to him before her kidnapping, and eventually Mark and Megan track Kelly
down to his home. Mark insists on going in alone and is easily knocked out by
Kelly, but the police — who at first blew off Megan’s and Mark’s concerns,
saying that Grace was obviously just another teenage runaway who didn’t want to
be found — end up at the house and all ends well. This time the tag scene is preceded
by a title that reads “One Year Later,”
and one year later Grace’s photo is on the cover of Empowering Women magazine (so she finally made it onto a magazine cover, even though hardly in
the way she originally planned) and it seems like she’s on her way to college
after all, as well as into Mark’s waiting arms. Trapped Model didn’t seem all that interesting in the promos —
“Oh, no, not another one of those,”
I thought — but it turned out to be quite good, an engaging couple of hours in
a sea of sordid kinkiness thanks to more subtlety than usual in the direction,
the writing, and above all in Wes McGee’s wonderful acting as the villain. He’s
got superstar potential if only he and his agents can break him out of the TV
ghetto and get him the feature-film roles he deserves!
