by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched yet another “premiere” on
Lifetime, which after the excellence of The College Admissions Scandal (a great story to begin with, told powerfully,
movingly and with a degree of understatement rare on this network) was a return
to their usual schlock and, if
anything, was below their average. It was called Killer Contractor — a title risible enough in itself — and starts out
with a mysterious figure in a black hoodie (not another mysterious figure in a black hoodie!) loosening two
screws on a banister rail in and old house so its elderly male occupant falls
down the stairwell and dies. The scene then shifts to San Francisco (we get
that from a stock shot of the San Francisco skyline which includes Coit Tower
and the Transamerica pyramid) where we meet the old man’s daughter and
granddaughter. The daughter is Kerry McLeod (Alyshia Ochse) — the last name is
pronounced “Mc-LEE-odd,” not the more usual “Mc-CLOUD,” by the way — and she
makes her living as a writer and illustrator of a highly successful series of
children’s books called the “Ella” series, after her own daughter. (Oddly, the
imdb.com page on this movie doesn’t list the child actress who plays Ella,
though some adult cast members in shorter and less significant roles are listed.)
Kerry and Ella go to the small town where
Old Man McLeod lived with the plan of hiring a contractor to fix up the house
and then sell it. They’re greeted by an annoyingly chipper realtor (or is that
“Realtor™”) named Claire, who gets to wiggle her ass at the camera a lot
(director John Murlowski is really into ass shots, of both men and women) and
at first agrees to list the house for sale but then decides she wants to buy it
herself. Of course, the Killer Contractor hears this and breaks into Claire’s
own home, rewiring her electric circuitry so she gets electrocuted when she
tries to turn on a light switch. We meet the Killer Contractor, Mike Dean (Zac
Titus), when he turns up on the property and asks for the job — and like a
typically stupid Lifetime heroine, instead of going to Home Advisor or Angie’s
List or anywhere else that would be sensible, she hires him on the spot because
they were friends back in high school. Indeed, Kerry’s friend Meghan (Kendra
Andrews) warns her against Mike because she was also in high school with them and
noticed him hanging around her a lot in what she assumed was an unrequited
crush Mike had on Kerry. The next person we meet is the Good Contractor, Jason
Carr (Mark Lawson), who’s shorter and stockier than Mike but also a good deal
better-looking (and director Murlowski gives us some nice shots of his basket —
yum!), who also bids for the job
of fixing Kerry’s house but is just a few minutes too late. He offers to look
around the place and goes into the attic, pronouncing it just fine, while Mike
insists it needs work. This becomes significant when Kerry goes into the attic, we see some removed screws on the floor, and sure enough she tumbles through the floor and onto her couch, where she lands surprisingly little-scathed.
Just as I was praising this movie for defying Lifetime’s
usual iconography in which the cute guy is almost always the villain, Charles
warned me that the writer, Meridith Stack (the imdb.com page spells her first
name the more normal way, “Meredith,” but “Meridith” is what appears on her
credit), might be setting us up for a reversal in which Jason would turn out to
be the Killer Contractor and Mike the Good — or at least Morally Ambiguous —
Contractor. We also get a number of twitchy scenes between Mike and his mother
Eleanor (a marvelously acid performance by Rebecca Tinley) in which Mike
lovingly fingers photos of himself and Kerry when they were kids and Eleanor
tells him he shouldn’t think of her and threatens to burn the photos. It turns
out from an insurance investigator that the MacGuffin is a large life-insurance
policy that Kerry’s dad took out on himself with Kerry and Mike as
co-beneficiaries — and in the first of Stack’s spectacular reversals, it turns
out that Mike is actually Kerry’s half-brother, since her dad had an affair
with Eleanor before he married Kerry’s mom. Dad was planning to rewrite the
insurance policy so Kerry would be sole beneficiary, but he didn’t sign the
form to do that before he died — and sure enough, with just 15 minutes of
running time to go, Stack pulls her second big reversal and has Jason turn out
to be the Killer Contractor after all (something we should have been expecting
not only because Mark Lawson was so much hotter than Zac Titus but also because
Jason drove a black truck while Mike drove a white truck — a throwback to all
those “B” Westerns in which the good guy wore a white hat and rode a white
horse, while the bad guy wore a black hat and rode a black horse) — indeed he’s
a literal “contractor,” meaning a hit man, and he’s desperately in need of
money because his previous employers are going to have him “hit” if he doesn’t come up with some scratch,
pronto.
The person who’s hired him for this job is Eleanor Dean, Mike’s mother,
who’s after the insurance money for herself and doesn’t care how many people
she has to kill — including all the McLeods (it was Jason who loosened the
banister rail in granddad’s home and thereby started all this) as well as her
own son and Meghan, who stumbles on the truth, gets clubbed by Eleanor,
survives but is tied up, manages to escape her bonds but is run over by a van,
taken to the hospital and revived, only Eleanor, who happens to work at the
hospital as a nurse, shows up for her shift and takes an unauthorized detour
into Meghan’s room, where she intends to smother her with a pillow (how is she
going to make that look like an
accident? In most Lifetime movies in which a nurse tries to murder a patient,
it’s by introducing a toxic substance into her IV), only the police show up and
arrest her in time, while both Mike and Kerry herself take their swings at the real Killer Contractor and finally subdue him long enough
for the cops to arrest him, too. Killer Contractor is a good example of everything that’s wrong with Lifetime
movies, from the risible title to the melodramatic situations to the
ill-justified reversals (though Mark Lawson deserves credit as an actor for
playing both the good and evil incarnations of his character superbly, and I’d
like to see more of him) and the over-the-top ending (about the one Lifetime
cliché Murlowski and Stack avoided was having the villain kidnap daughter Ella
at the end), and yet it’s also a thrill ride of pure camp and therefore manages
to be entertaining.
