by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Sunday Lifetime
offered a movie they billed as a “premiere” even though imdb.com gave its
release date as October 18, 2019 and there’s even a review on their site. It
was called Sleeping with My Student and was actually a pretty close remake of a 2018 Lifetime movie called The
Wrong Teacher, which despite different
directors and writers (Sleeping with My Student was directed by Tom Shell and written by Michael
Perronne, while The Wrong Teacher was directed by old Lifetime hand Dennis DeCoteau and written by Robert
Dean Klein) was awfully close to this one. Sleeping with My Student opens with a prologue set in 2002, in which a man,
a woman and a child are riding in a car. The man is driving and he’s in an
argument with the woman, though we don’t hear enough of the dialogue to figure
out what they’re arguing about. The woman reaches for the wheel and predictably
it causes the car to crash, and we think the two adults died and the kid lived.
Flash-forward 17 years later, and the kid has grown up to be Ian Johnson
(Mitchell Hoog), who looks something like a blond version of the young Leonardo
di Caprio.
Meanwhile, a high-school teacher named Kathy Sullivan (Gina Holden,
top-billed and a frequent star in Lifetime movies) has risen and just been
offered a job as school principal. But her home life is not so happy: she’s just
separated from her husband Ben (David Lipper, who looks even homelier than the
guys Lifetime usually cast as innocent husbands; he reminded me of Dick Van
Patten in Eight Is Enough and all the jokes I made in the late 1970’s about how he looked like
he’d been baked out of Wonder Bread dough) and this is having the predictable
effects on their daughter Bree (Jessica Belkin), a boyishly slim teenager with
long, straight blond hair. Just before the school year starts and Kathy is
about to take her new position as principal, her girlfriends Megan (Novi Brown)
and Gina (Olivia Bak) persuade her to join them on an all-woman vacation to
Miami Beach, Florida, where the air conditioning conks out in their room and a
young maintenance man — yep, our villain-to-be Ian Johnson — comes to their
room, fixes it and then turns up in the hotel pool where Kathy is swimming. He
advances on her and flashes a quite beautiful twink body at her until she
succumbs. Then she does a big double-take on the first day of school when he turns
up as a member of the student body. She checks her records and finds out he was
18 when they tricked — so at least she isn’t guilty of statutory rape, but
she’s well aware that if anyone finds out she slept (and more) with one of her
students she risks disgrace, being fired and driven out from the education
profession, and possibly losing custody of Bree because her separated husband
could sue to have her taken away. We also learn that Ian filmed himself and
Kathy having sex — he propped his smartphone on top of a dresser and turned on
its video recorder — one of the few aspects in which Sleeping with My
Student was better than The
Wrong Teacher, in which the seductive
student turned up with a video record of him and his teacher having sex but
with no clue about how he made it.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, once he’s
safely enconsed in his new high school (where he’s repeating his senior year
because in his previous one he cut up so badly he flunked out) he starts
cruising Kathy’s daughter Bree — who of course starts hating her mom for
over-reacting and trying to break up the budding romance between her and the
one boy in school who actually seems to give a damn about her. Anyone who’s
watched more than three Lifetime movies in their life has probably guessed that
Ian deliberately targeted Kathy to seduce her and then try to seduce her
daughter out of some twisted revenge plot, and it turns out that Ian’s mother
did not die in the opening car
crash (though his dad did) but survived, only she married someone even creepier
than Ian’s father: Boom Lee (Steve Humphreys), a fat slob who lives with her in
a tumble-down shack on the outskirts of town, makes his living by dealing
illegally obtained prescription drugs (the fact that he’s dealing prescription
drugs and not selling heroin or cooking meth or crack marks this as a 2019 drug
story) and keeping Ian’s mom hooked on the stuff so she won’t leave him. The
big twist [spoiler alert!] is that Ian and Kathy’s daughter Bree are actually half-siblings:
almost two decades earlier Kathy was working as a teacher in a school and
seduced the custodian, Ian’s dad, into having an affair with her. She got
pregnant from this and then started dating Ben, who agreed to raise Bree as if
she were his biological child and never to tell her the truth about her
parentage — only Ian naturally blames Kathy for the ruination of his mom (he
tells Kathy — and us — during the big confrontation scene at the end that what
his parents were arguing about when they crashed their car was his dad’s affair
with Kathy) and hatched this whole plot to seduce and destroy her to get his
revenge. The film ends with Ian getting his and Kathy and her husband Ben
reconciling, while she’s able to continue as school principal and live down her
scandalous behavior not only with Ian but with Ian’s dad nearly two decades
earlier.
Sleeping with My Student (originally titled Deadly Vengeance, which would have been too generic and not have
the sleazy “oomph” of the title they ultimately went with) is an O.K. Lifetime
movie, but The Wrong Teacher did the basic plot — a teacher goes out of town for a summer vacation,
has a one-night stand with a much younger man, then does a double-take when he
turns up as a student of hers and has to worry both about the ramifications of
her conduct and his obsession with her — quite a bit better. It helped that the
wrong student (sorry, but I couldn’t resist the pun) in The Wrong Teacher is played by Philip McElroy, a much better actor than Mitchell Hoog and also, to my
mind at least, considerably sexier. (When I reviewed The Wrong Teacher for this blog I described him as “a darkly
handsome young man whose great looks and skillful acting should make him a future star.”) The Wrong Teacher also had a better, if psychologically kinkier,
explanation for what made the villain “run.” I might have liked Sleeping
with My Student better if The Wrong
Teacher hadn’t existed (or I
hadn’t seen it), but after a while the similarities just started to wear me
down and I began to wonder — always the problem with remakes or quasi-remakes —
why they didn’t just re-show the first film instead of doing it all over again,
and doing a lamer version?
