by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I spent six hours
“binge-watching” three Lifetime movies from the channel’s current “Mommy
Madness” marathon — only one of the three films shown actually featured a
potentially crazy mother, and even that
one had a surprise twist ending (a double surprise, actually — more on that later). I started at 6 p.m. with The
Perfect Mother, which from the title I
would have expected to be one of Christine Conradt’s “Perfect … ” scripts in
which the nanny/teacher/boyfriend/girlfriend/visiting nurse/physical
therapist/life coach/whatever seemingly from heaven turns out to be from hell.
In this one, though, it’s not the mother who’s crazy: the film opens with a
blonde-haired young chicklet named … well, we don’t learn her name this early,
but we see her with an older black-haired woman whom she force-feeds a cake
with poison in it. After the dark-haired woman is dead Our Anti-Heroine doesn’t
attempt to dispose of the body; she just leaves it tied up to a chair with
glastly streaks of blood dripping from its mouth, and one wonders why no one in
the neighborhood doesn’t notice the stench as the body inevitably starts to
decompose. In the next scene we finally find out who the killer is — Peyton Kelly (Audrey Whitby), who even
though she lives just a few doors down from her latest prey, has until recently
attended a different high school. We also learn that the woman she was living
with, whom she so spectacularly killed in the opening sequence, was her
stepmother, whom she got stuck with following the deaths first of her real
mother and then of her father, and whom she never could stand.
Right now she’s
telling people that her stepmom has a really bad staph infection and she’s
worried about catching it if she stays under the same roof with her (a plot
line all too timely today!), so
she’s staying with a fashion designer named Harper Pryce (Susie Abromeit) for
whom her real mom used to work as a model. But she’s got her sights set on two
women who do a mother-and-daughter blog (a vlog, actually, since they do it with their computer’s
camera) and tell the world how wonderful their lives together are. The mother
is Stella Marshall (Sunny Mabrey) and her daughter is Shay (Lily Sepe), though
things aren’t as perfectly happy as they portray them online. I can’t remember
whether Stella is raising her daughter as a single mom because Shay’s father
left her for a younger woman or just died (details like that tend to blur when
you watch three Lifetime movies in a row!), but for the first time since dad
either departed the family or departed the planet mom has a boyfriend.
Unfortunately for her relationship with Shay, her new boyfriend is Shay’s
English teacher, Isaac Feldman (Rusty Joiner), and if your idea of a
high-school English teacher with a Jewish name is a glasses-wearing nerd, think
again: Rusty Joiner is a hot, hunky piece of man-meat, especially in the scene
in which Shay catches him in the house wearing nothing but tight blue undies, showing a glorious bod
featuring pecs to die for and obviously getting ready to haul Shay’s mom’s ashes. Actually Shay has a
boyfriend of her own, Jake (Zach Peladeau), and though he’s hardly a patch on
her mom’s man in the looks department he’s certainly cute and hunky enough to
be fun to watch. Peyton moves in on this family like a shark cruising a school
of fish, ingratiating herself with Stella and at one point faking an attack
from Harper, the nice woman she’s staying with, by stabbing herself with a
corkscrew (ouch!) and telling the police Harper attacked her.
Written and
directed by Jake Helgren — whose work here in both departments is so sloppy it
makes the last film of his I saw on Lifetime, Killer Dream Home, look like a suspense masterpiece by comparison — The
Perfect Mother follows Lifetime’s formula
of perky teen psycho all too rigidly, with Peyton using a variety of methods to
murder or threaten anyone who stands in the way of her … well, it’s not all
that clear what she wants to do,
but it seems her ultimate goal is to eliminate Shay and replace her as Stella’s
“perfect” daughter. It’s got an O.K. performance by Audrey Whitby as the perky
psycho, but other actresses have done this schtick better in previous Lifetime movies and this one is
decidedly unmemorable, though it does have a nice ending with Peyton a-goner (I think; maybe she got captured alive and institutionalized, but I
don’t think so) and Shay surprising Stella with a vacation to Cabo San Lucas
(maybe the bit about Peyton passing off her stepmother’s incapacitation as a
staph infection is au courant,
but the whole idea of actually going somewhere for a vacation, and especially leaving the country to do so, seems almost
unbearably dated: taking physical vacations seems as obsolete a concept right
now as eating indoors in a restaurant or drinking in a bar!) she’s paid for
with the earnings from her job as a barista in a coffeehouse (remember coffeehouses? I suspect if the SARS-CoV-2 crisis goes on much
longer restaurants, bars, coffeehouses, movie theatres, live theatres and
perhaps even live church services will become things of ancient history and all of those activities will have moved in people’s
homes or online).
