by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I finally got
a new fix of one of Lifetime’s sleazy “pussies in peril” thrillers (the
description was New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd’s from her book Are Men Necessary?) after over two months in which they stopped showing
any movies but sappy holiday stories that interested me not at all. This was
called Deadly Hollywood Obsession
and dealt with a young woman named Casey Wright (the personable Sarah Roemer)
whose fourth-grade class at an exclusive private school where she’s temping and
hoping for a permanent job the next year includes Jack Austin (Brady Bond), son
of movie superstar Sam Austin (Jon Prescott). When a creepy woman named Lynette
Marris (Hannah Barefoot — yes, that’s what it says on her credit!) tries to
kidnap Jack after school, telling him his dad has sent her to pick him up and take
him for ice cream (that’s what gets Casey’s suspicions up because Sam Austin is
a health freak who wouldn’t let his son have something as unhealthy as ice
cream!), Casey breaks them up, rescues Jack, and apparently earns Sam’s undying
loyalty and affection. Six months earlier, in a typical Lifetime prologue,
Sam’s wife Naomi Tills (Kate Watson), also a movie actress (with the similarity
of the names I’m thinking writer Patrick Roberts was thinking Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman here — though instead of getting killed, Kidman divorced Cruise,
which actually turned out to be a boost for her career!), was shot and killed
by a mysterious hooded driver who ran her car off the road.
Sam Austin offers
Casey a private job as governess for Jack, whom he’s decided to pull out of
school and have him home-schooled instead, and though she’s uncertain the big
salary he’s willing to pay will allow her to keep her comatose mother Celeste
(Patty Ann Nix) in a nursing home to which she owes $1,400 she has no way to
pay. (Welcome to the club, fellow victim of America’s insane profit-driven
health-care system.) Sam pays off the nursing home, drinks with Casey and
ultimately seduces her, while Lynette seems able to skulk around Sam’s home
almost willy-nilly when she isn’t pulling stuff like breaking into the
apartment Casey shares with her African-American best friend T. J. Jones (Tia
Hendricks) and spray-painting the walls with slogans like “LAY OFF BITCH SAM IS
MINE.” (I feared for the life expectancy of the African-American best friend —
usually Lifetime heroines’ Black confidantes learn the villains’ secret plans
but get killed before they can tell the heroine — but T. J. is alive and well
at the end of this one and the killing-off-the-Black-friend cliché seems be one
part of the formula Lifetime’s current writers are moving away from.) There’s
also Sam’s personal assistant, Mark Haynes (Adrian Gaeta, who frankly did more
for me aesthetically than Jon Prescott did!), who seems to have some sinister
connection with Lynette, as well as a blond cop who seems to be either on Sam’s
payroll or just eager to keep on his good side. In one scene a frazzled Lynette
goes through her closet and slashes a rack of unusually voluminous dresses —
our friend Garry, who was watching this with me, thought they looked like
maternity clothes, which made me wonder if the big twist at the end of Roberts’
script would be that Lynette was Jack’s surrogate mother (since an ambitious
actress like Naomi wouldn’t want to take off the several months out of her career
required to produce a child au naturel) and this gave her the delusion that they were meant to be a couple.
Instead, Roberts swung for the fences, cliché-wise, and in a climax at a
deserted mountain cabin (not another
deserted mountain cabin — and this one didn’t even have the excuse of being out
of cell-phone range, since when the situation goes south Casey is able to get
Jack to call 911 on his ubiquitous tablet) in which Casey watches a file on
Jack’s tablet (Jack wants to be a movie director and is always photographing
stuff with it) showing Sam and Lynette plotting Naomi’s murder. She realizes
that everyone else in the movie
is in on it — Sam ordered it because Naomi was getting too ambitious and
assertive (and Sam, like a lot of other Lifetime villains, wants his women
totally obedient), though Lynette actually committed it in hopes Sam would
reward her by making her the next Mrs. Sam Austin. When Sam turned his
attentions to Casey instead, Lynette had a jealous hissy-fit which ended up
with her invading Sam’s apartment and going after him with a knife — and
director Daniel Ringey had them fall off the back of Sam’s couch in their
deadly embrace, with Lynette emerging dead from her own knife and Sam wounded
but O.K. (This is the best scene in an otherwise plainly directed movie;
apparently Ringey had read the interview with Alfred Hitchcock in which the
Master said you should direct murders like love scenes and love scenes like
murders.) It turns out that Sam, Mark and the blond cop were all involved with
the cover-up (and also asked the Ukrainian government for dirt on Joe Biden —
no, not really) and Casey saves herself and Jack by having them flee into the
woods, where they hide out from Jack’s murderous dad long enough for the police
to respond to Jack’s 9/11 call and arrest Sam and Mark. It wasn’t much of a
movie but it was fun to see one
of Lifetime’s cheesy thrillers again; I like Lifetime much better when they cut the milk of human kindness with
acid instead of drowning it in glucose!
