by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s next “premiere,” Black Hearted Killer, directed by Roxy Shih from a script by Adam Rockoff
(the director’s name meant nothing to me but Rockoff has contributed some
relatively good scripts to Lifetime before), had one of the weirdest premises
ever concocted for a Lifetime movie. So far they have had supposedly “perfect”
nannies, teachers, husbands, wives, visiting nurses, physical therapists and
babysitters who’ve turned out to be psychos; this one they might as well have
called The Perfect Heart-Transplant Recipient. (Ironically, for Easter — a week after showing this
film, with its cynical view of heart-transplant recipients — Lifetime is
showing A Question of Faith, a
reverential treatment of heart transplants with African-Americans as the
principals — sort of like Frank Capra doing his cynical treatment of white
people in Asia, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, in 1933, four years before he did his reverential
one, Lost Horizon.) The
establishing premise of this one is that a few years before the action of this
film, long-time married couple Juley (Julie McNiven) and Dennis (Jon Abrahams)
Cummings lost their teenage daughter Madison in a car accident. But they
stipulated while Madison was in a coma and on her deathbed that they would
allow any of her organs to be used for transplants, and in the modern-day
action a young, rather scapegrace woman named Vera (Kelley Jakle) shows up and
claims to have been the recipient of Madison Cummings’ heart.
Vera proceeds to
declare herself part of the Cummings “family” — after all, she is (or at least
she says she is) walking around
with a particularly important organ from the Cummings’ otherwise deceased
daughter — and to show up at their home, uninvited, for a party Dennis Cummings
is giving for his boss to celebrate his promotion. (He’s in some kind of
investment firm — we think — while she’s an interior designer, and between them
they make so much money they’ve been able to afford a palatial estate, complete
with a huge wood-paneled front
door and a big backyard with a swimming pool.) Vera scams $5,000 from Juley,
ostensibly to pay for the anti-rejection drugs she needs to survive the
transplant, but that arouses Dennis’s suspicions. So does the way she swigs
champagne from the bottle at their party (aren’t transplant patients supposed
to avoid alcohol, they wonder?)
and the needle marks on her arm, which she says are from IV’s she got during
the long bouts of care for her transplant but they suspect indicate
recreational drug use. When Dennis throws Vera out of the big party and tells
her they never want to see her again, Vera mutters, “You’ll be sorry” — and the
next thing that happens is their car is vandalized: its windows are smashed in
with a baseball bat and two of its tires are slashed. They report it to the
police and a detective named Quinn (Clark Freeman) — we’re never told his first
name but he’s by far the sexiest guy in the film, which at least for a while
had me wondering if he’d turn out to be Vera’s boyfriend and part of her plot,
whatever it is — explains that since they didn’t catch her in the act, there’s
nothing he can do about it. Eventually the Cummingses try to trace exactly what
happened to their daughter’s heart; the head of the agency that arranged the
transplant refuses to tell her on grounds of “confidentiality” (or, as I like
to call it, “medical omertà”) but
her assistant Bethany (Lynn Chen) slips them the information that Vera did not get their late daughter’s heart. Instead it went to
a mixed-race couple (he white, she Black) who used it to save the life of their daughter. Vera goes on a murderous rampage and
manages to surprise and kill both Bethany (with a bag over her head) and
Detective Quinn (by strangling him with what looks like a belt — she’s hidden
in the back seat of his car and waited for him to return to give her her
opportunity) before going after the Cummingses.
In a Christine Conradtian
attempt to give some complexity
and at least a soupcon of
sympathy to the villainess, we learn that “Vera”’s real name is Rlley Leeds and
her twin sister Carrie was killed in the same car accident that knocked off
Madison Cummings. Riley blamed both Madison and her mom for Carrie’s death and
intends to shoot both Juley and Dennis with the gun she stole from the
policeman she killed, and their only choice in the matter is whether she
decides to kill them quickly or put them through the same slow, agonizing death
Carrie went through. Writer Rockoff gives us the typical Lifetime climax: Riley
lures Juley to a big house she’s commandeered for the occasion, with hideous
wallpaper that made me think this is what a PRC movie would have looked like if
they’d shot them in color, and though Dennis tries to warn her it’s a trap,
does Our Heroine listen? No-o-o-o-o,
she goes there, Riley overpowers her and looks like she’s about to kill her
when Dennis, who has presumably traced her there through a locator app on her
phone, sneaks up behind Riley with a tire iron and clubs her unconscious.
Dennis is about to beat Riley to death but Juley stops him — a mistake,
especially since Dennis leaves the tire iron behind and Riley is able to grab
it, smash the Cummings’ car’s windshield (not again!) and threaten Dennis’s life — only Juley was
somehow able to grab the gun (ya remember the gun?) and she uses it to shoot Riley dead. Then the cops arrive. Like Mommy Is a Murderer, Black Hearted Killer is an O.K. Lifetime movie, decently acted — though
Heather McComb isn’t able to bring the depths to her psycho character some of
the other Lifetime actresses who’ve played these “bad girls” have — and
effectively staged by director Shih with at least some flair for suspense and Gothic atmosphere. It’s just
that the central premise is getting stale for overuse, and as I was writing the
above Charles suggested SARS-CoV-2-inspired premises for future Lifetime
movies: The Perfect Stay-at-Home Partner and The Perfect Pizza Delivery Guy Who’s the Only Person the
Heroine Sees Except Her Kids.
