by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime showed a “Premiere” movie last night as part of
what they called their “Psycho Weekend” — a film they’d heavily hyped during
the last week or so. It was called Psycho Party Planner — it was originally shot under the less florid title
The Party Planner but someone at
Lifetime added the first “P”-word in hopes, I presume, of making it sound more
lurid and therefore a hotter audience draw. It begins with a scene whose
significance only becomes important later: an argument between Griff Shores
(Matthew Atkinson, whom we get to see topless — and he’s far from the only guy
we get to see without a shirt in this movie! — and he’s a hunk to die for:
tall, muscular, great pecs and enough bits of chest hair to avoid the
beached-whale look of the otherwise hunky Sean Faris in the previous night’s
Lifetime “premiere,” Psycho Nurse)
and his wife Lindy (Katrina Begin). Griff is some sort of elected official — at
the start of the film he’s a Congressmember but later, in an online clipping
announcing his “accidental” death, writer-director Jake Helgren identifies him
as a U.S. Senator. Either way, he and Lindy get into an argument when she tells
him that something has gone wrong with her reproductive system and she can no
longer have children, and he freaks out because he wants an heir. She says they
could always adopt, and (apparently with visions of the Kennedys and the Bushes
dancing in his head) he declares, “Celebrities adopt. Politicians form bloodlines!”
Then she pushes him down a long flight of stairs,
killing him. Later she turns up offering her services as a party planner to
Kayla Anderson (Lindsey McKeon, top-billed) and her husband Jason (Marco
Dapper, who’s not quite as hot as the sadly departed Matthew Atkinson but is
still tall, muscular and an appealing hunk of man-meat instead of the tall,
lanky, sandy-haired milquetoast type Lifetime usually casts as the innocent,
put-upon husband of the week’s Pussy in Peril!) for the sweet-16 party they’re
throwing for their daughter Kerry (Cathryn Dylan). They interview two people
for the job, Lindy and professional party planner Dulcie Lowe (Stefanie Black),
a heavy-set woman with an almost martinet-like determination to plan the party
with dress codes and other tactics to make sure the male and female teen guests
don’t have the chance to sneak off for hanky-panky with each other. Lindy shows
up at Dulcie’s home — she used one of her late husband’s contacts to hack into
the state’s computers and find out where she lived — and pleads with Dulcie to
let her have the Anderson job. Dulcie endures three of Lindy’s drop-ins, tells
her to get lost and threatens to call the police on her — too late, as Lindy
grabs the statue from Dulcie’s front porch, clubs her with it, kills her and
for good measure steals Dulcie’s dog Cher. Lindy gets the job of planning the
sweet sixteen party for Kerry Anderson (whose first scene shows her in a quite
spectacular form-fitting long-sleeved rainbow-striped shirt, by the way) and
promptly blows through the $2,000 budget the adult Andersons have given her for
the event.
She gets Kerry a spectacular white dress, insists on an off-site
venue for the event instead of doing it at the Andersons’ home and gets Marlow
Meadows (Jud Tyler — a woman named Jud?) to let the drill team at Kerry’s high
school, of which Kerry is a member and Marlow the coach, perform at the event
by blackmailing Marlow and threatening to reveal the extra-marital affair she’s
having with the school’s basketball coach, Charlie (Parker Mack — yet another marvelously hot guy we get to see in this movie,
especially when he and Marlow are frolicking around in Marlow’s swimming pool
and he’s wearing nothing but swim trunks — yum!). By this time we’re not only
wondering just what is so
important about Kerry’s sweet-sixteen party that Lindy will kill all these
people in order to plan it — and we start to suspect even before Helgren drops
us the big clue what it is. Whoever the film’s casting director was (imdb.com
doesn’t list one), he or she gave us our first indication by casting Caitlyn
Dylan as Kerry and finding someone for the role who looks a lot more like the
similarly lithe, blonde Katrina Begin (the psycho party planner) than like
Lindsey McKeon, who’s supposed to be her mother but is shorter, heavier-set and
has black hair. We get our second clue about halfway through the movie when the
older Andersons drop a reference to Kerry having been adopted and Lindy tells
Kerry about a month before the big party, so it’s not that big a surprise when [spoiler alert!] Lindy confronts Kerry and her adoptive parents on the
night of the big party and tells her that she, Lindy, is her biological mother.
Psycho Party Planner is pretty
typical Lifetime — though at least Helgren didn’t go so far as other Lifetime
writers and have Lindy try to seduce Jason Anderson and offer to replace his
wife Kayla if Jason will just help her with the little matter of murdering her
— and order is restored and Lindy gets hers when, while she’s holding a gun on
her parents, Kerry herself comes from behind and clubs her with the convenient
blunt object, taking her out. “Is she dead?” Kerry asks, and Helgren and
cinematographer Lars Lindstrom answer the question by showing us a picturesque
pool of blood oozing from under Lindy’s head. Psycho Party Planner is acceptable Lifetime fare, with none of the actors
delivering the incandescent performance of Lyndon Smith as the “Psycho Nurse”
in the preceding night’s Lifetime premiere, but none of them as weak as Abbie
Cobb as that film’s victim either; though through much of the film Lindsey
McKeon does little more than mope as she sees Lindy moving in on her daughter,
she’s good enough to become a powerful revenge figure by the end and the
heroine-villain clashes are at least better matched than the ones in Psycho
Nurse.
