by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie was Psycho Nurse, a Michael Feifer production from Feifer Worldwide
and MarVista Entertainment (I’ve joked before that Michael Feifer slaps his
name on so many places in his credits that some day I expect to see a movie
credit reading, “Associate Producer: Michael Feifer, Jr., A Michael Feifer Production”),
though this time he merely directed and let another person, Hannah C. Langley,
write the script. What Langley came up with was a pretty typical Lifetime
script with one of the most frightening scenes I’ve ever seen: nursing-home
patient Ida Leonard (Nancy Petersen) is talking to her nurse Gwen (Lyndon Smith
— a woman named Lyndon?) about how, like the singer in “Ol’ Man River,” she’s
“tired of livin’ but a-feared of dyin’.” Gwen — superbly acted by Smith, whose
angelic face gradually hardens into something you could strike matches on as
both Ida and we realize that she has every intention of resolving Ida’s dilemma
by dispatching her ahead of schedule — turns off the oxygen pump that’s
enabling Ida to breathe, then cinches the hose so whatever oxygen still in the
hose won’t go through either and she’ll suffocate. Then, just as Ida has lost
consciousness, Gwen goes into the hallway screaming for help reviving her — not
only are we thinking “Münchhausen Syndrome by Proxy” (the rather awkward name —
derived from the legendary teller of tall tales — for a mental illness in which
a person causes a disaster and then expects recognition as a hero for “solving”
the crisis they’ve caused … sort of like Donald Trump) but it turned out on the
imdb.com page for this film that it was originally shot under the title Münchhausen
by Internet — and though Ida apparently
survives that time she croaks later and Gwen loses her job at the nursing home.
She offers herself as a live-in in-home caregiver (watching this movie was a
busman’s holiday for me, especially since I’d had to put one of my clients into
an emergency room that very day!) and gets hired by Mira (Abbie Cobb) and her
husband Todd (Sean Faris) to take care of their son Max (Griffin Morgan) —
Langley’s script tells us he’s seven but he looked more like 10 to me — who has
muscular dystrophy and first started manifesting symptoms a year before our
story begins.
Naturally, this being a Lifetime movie, Todd and Mira both think
Gwen is absolutely wonderful and that they’ve lucked out by having her — only
Mira has not only one, but two,
African-American friends who are going to catch onto Gwen’s real nature but die
for their pains before they can warn her. One is Max’s doctor, Dr. Keller
(Rolonda Watts), who doesn’t even make it out of the first act alive; she comes
over bringing a new pair of crutches for Max which will be easier because
they’re aluminum instead of wood, only she remembers Gwen from a previous job
in which Gwen threatened the lives of patients and threatens to expose her.
Gwen, knowing that Dr. Keller had a history of drug addiction and was only
recently successfully rehabbed and let back into practice, knocks her
unconscious with a thick glass vase (it doesn’t even break, and the
too-cool-to-move Gwen casually dusts it and puts it on the shelf from whence it
came) and then takes Dr. Keller to her home down the street and shoots her full
of heroin (or something) that will make it look like she relapsed and O.D.’d.
The other Black best friend who bites the big one before she can warn Mira of
what Gwen really is is her business partner Karen (Mieko Hillman), who’s
involved with her in some sort of job (either architecture or interior design,
we suspect) that requires them to walk around with large carry bags filled with
huge pieces of paper representing plans, only she researches Gwen’s background
on the Internet and also catches her in one of her scams to keep Mira under her
thumb: after suggesting Mira attend a support group for other parents of kids with
muscular dystrophy, she calls her frequently, posing as a man Mira met in the
group — she calls herself “David” and uses a voice filter on her computer to
sound male, and posts a low-resolution photo of “David” to give Mira an idea of
what (s)he looks like without offering anything too recognizable. Only Mira has
also been getting e-mails from the real David — it seems Gwen stole the identity from the husband of a former
patient of hers — saying that the “David” who’s communicating with Mira is a
fake and offering to meet with her.
Anyway, Gwen kills Karen after Karen
catches her in the middle of one of her “David” calls to Mira, and she also
kills the real David — who turns out to be former investment banker David
Webber (Jay Wilkins), though if he was an investment banker one wonders why
he’s now living in a cheap motel room. David tells Mira that Gwen was the
live-in nurse of his late wife Louise, who died of cancer — for which David
blames Gwen because Gwen talked Louise out of doing chemo and into pursuing
“alternative” remedies instead. One wonders how writer Langley and
producer-director Feifer are going to bring this one to an end, which they do
by having Mira at last catch on to Gwen when she hears “David” refer to her son
Max as “little guy” — Gwen’s favorite nickname for him. Alas, Gwen catches on
that she’s caught on and lures her into Gwen’s car by claiming (falsely, though
the business of kidnapping the kid in the last act of a Lifetime movie is so common a device of theirs no wonder Mira believes
it) that she’s kidnapped Max but will take Mira to where she’s holding him.
Gwen tells Mira flat-out that she’s been neglecting both Max and her husband
Todd — who somehow got persuaded (by Gwen, or just on his own?) that Mira was
having an affair and the mysterious “David” was the guy she was having it with
— and so she’s going to kill Mira and set it up to look like it was suicide
motivated by her guilt over having killed Todd, since Gwen has told Mira she
got Mira’s blood and plastered it all over the knife with which Gwen killed the
real David, along with putting Mira’s prints on it (how? Actually we’re
obviously supposed to think Gwen is lying precisely because of the sheer unlikeliness of what she’s telling
Mira.) The two women struggle for the knife (Maurine Watkins wants to know from
her plagiarism attorney if she can sue for “they both reached for the knife”
because it’s so similar to “they both reached for the gun”) and Mira ultimately
takes out Gwen and, it’s hinted in the final scene, quits her job so she can take care of Max full-time.
Psycho
Nurse is a pretty typical Lifetime movie
that has an unusually good performance by Lyndon Smith in the title role — it’s
a virtuoso job of acting that enables us to see both the kind, caring veneer she puts on and the hard
heart underneath — but the film really needed a stronger actress as her rival
than the dull, kewpie-doll-like Abbie Cobb as Mira. Her husband Todd is played
by Sean Faris, who’s a nice, tall, dark-haired hunk of man-meat — we get to see
him topless at least twice, and he’s got great pecs, though I’d have found him
sexier if his chest weren’t so totally smooth (a little hair — or a lot — on
the body is a turn-on for me). Psycho Nurse was an O.K. Lifetime movie, cut to their formula but
with a few infinitesimal variations, and its main interest is Lyndon Smith’s
powerful acting that cuts through the all-too-conventional plotting, including
“holes” typical of Feifer’s work — like the way neither Mira nor anyone else
seems to miss her victims even though she’s supposedly close to them!
