by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I’ve been waiting for the
chance to comment on a couple of movies that aired on Lifetime last Sunday, one
billed as a “premiere” even though it was already shown in Canada (there’s an
imdb.com review dated September 2019) and one definitely dated 2018. The 2018
film was called Mistress Hunter and is about your typically clueless Lifetime heroine, Jackie Blanchard
(Lauralee Bell), who as the film begins notices that her husband Karl (Martin
Copping) seems to be growing more distant from her and their daughter Mikayla
(Caitlin Reagan). He’s also “working late” a lot of nights, and anyone who’s
seen more than two Lifetime movies in their own lifetime knows what that means. Jackie talks about this one night with her
girlfriends Valerie (Lauren Plaxco) and Melanie (Christy Meyers). They tell her
about a quasi-legendary figure in the neighborhood, a woman who calls herself a
“mistress hunter” and goes by the name Hannah (Lidya Look). It seems that
during her previous marriage she caught her husband cheating on her with
another woman and determined to make his life as miserable as possible before
divorcing him and getting as big a settlement as she could. When Jackie follows
her husband during his lunch break her suspicions are confirmed: Karl is meeting another woman for afternoon quickies in
what at first I thought was supposed to be a motel but turns out to be the
seedy apartment building in which she lives. Her name is Beth Robinson (Chloe
Brooks), and apparently she and Karl have been an “item” for several months.
Hannah the “mistress hunter,” who in the scene in which she and Jackie meet
leads her through an abandoned warehouse and puts her through a series of
security precautions that seems like she was reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond
novels on LSD, says that she can follow “Plan A” or “Plan B” — “Plan A” means
driving the adulterous husband crazy until he wants to bail on the relationship
and will pay whatever he has to in order to divorce his wife, while “Plan B” is
aimed at building the grounds for a reconciliation — only Hannah admits that
none of her clients have ever asked for “Plan B.” In order to lay the
groundwork for “Plan A” and give Hannah the evidence with which she needs to
work, Hannah tells Jackie to sneak into her husband’s office after hours and
take pictures of all his credit cards and any other financial information she
an find. Jackie briefly complains that Hannah is making her do all the work, but Hannah insists that as Karl’s
wife her presence in his office after hours would at least be explicable, where a total stranger’s wouldn’t.
The scare
campaign begins to work — in fact it begins to work too well, as we see a scene
in which Beth returns to her apartment expecting Karl to be there meeting her —
only Karl is all bloody and very dead in her bed. When the police come Beth is dead, too, leading the
typically clueless Lifetime cops to jump to the conclusion that it was a
murder-suicide — only we know
better because we saw Beth enter her apartment after Karl was already dead.
Later another woman in Jackie’s circle is also found murdered, and this time the cops are convinced Jackie is the culprit,
killing her husband and his mistress out of jealousy and revenge and later
killing the other woman because she “knew too much.” When Jackie tells them
about the “mistress hunter” the cops assume that she’s a figment of Jackie’s
imagination, a non-existent scapegoat on whom she can blame her own crimes. We
see the usual Lifetime mystery figure dressed in a hoodie, who at one point
pitches a bloody knife into Jackie’s recyclables trash can (I really doubt if a
bloody knife is recyclable), obviously to frame her. The conclusion comes when
Hannah hacks the personal photo file on Karl’s computer and reveals a whole
raft of pictures of Karl with his various affair partners — it seems Beth was
far from the first woman he cheated with — and one of them is [spoiler
alert!] Jackie’s friend Valerie,
who turns out to have killed all these people in an apparent attempt at
jealousy-fueled revenge because Karl had stayed with Jackie and started dating other women instead of leaving his
wife for Valerie. (This reminds me of Joy Fielding’s comment in her novel The
Other Woman to the effect that the
woman who’s the male lead’s second wife and started her affair with him while
he was still married to wife number one shouldn’t be at all surprised if he
starts seeing another woman while still married to her.)
Valerie committed all three murders and planted
the bloody knife in Jackie’s trash can so Jackie would go to prison for the
murders, and when the cops finally arrest Valerie (it’s nice writer J. Bryan
Dick — co-creator of the Whittendale University universe with Barbara Kymlicka,
which has always amused me if only becamse it’s so appropriate that Mr. Dick
and Ms. Cum-Licker would collaborate on these heavy-breathing tales of sex gone
wrong: the Whittendale films are all about young nubile female college students
prostituting or mistressing themselves to older men to get the money to pay
Whittendale’s tuition — actually lets Valerie be taken alive by the cops instead
of killed) and Jackie asks how could her best friend betray him by letting her
husband screw her, she comes up with a rather lame but still sad line to the
effect that you never know what love can make you do. In the end Jackie ends up as a single mom to her
daughter Mikayla (ya remember her daughter Mikayla?) and a new career as the business partner of the
Mistress Hunter — who tells her, not to any particular surprise, that “Hannah”
is not her real name — and from now on she only wants to pursue “Plan B,”
reconciliation, because after dumping her cheating first husband she married a
guy who’s faithful and really nice, and that’s the outcome she wants to spread to her future
clients. Mistress Hunter strikes
me as a better-than-average Lifetime movie, mostly credibly written by Dick and directed by Penelope
Bultenhuis — she may not be quite at the level of Christine Conradt and Vanessa
Parise but she’s still an indication of the depth of the talent pool of women
directors and the ongoing shame of the movie industry that they aren’t getting
the opportunities they deserve!
