by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
It’s 6:05 p.m. on Sunday,
April 26 and I just got finished watching Lifetime’s rerun of last week’s
Sunday “premiere” movie, Killer Prom — which was actually better than I expected. Directed by Alexander
Carrière from a script by Andrea Canning, Killer Prom was not the sort of thing you might have expected (or got from Lifetime’s
recent Homekilling Queen) — a
psycho teenager so determined to become prom queen at her high school that
she’s literally going to take out anyone
standing in her way, even if that means murdering her. It actually begins with
Hannah Wilson (Megan Vinson), wife of prominent Philadelphia-based heart
surgeon Dr. Tony Wilson (Mark Lutz, a drop-dead gorgeous hunk who’s so much
better-looking than the lanky, sandy-haired nobodies who usually play innocent husbands in Lifetime movies that for a while I
thought he was going to turn out to be a bad guy after all), visiting southern
California (we know it’s southern California because we see the “HOLLYWOOD”
sign) and going for a boat ride with her cousin Sienna Lawton (Yvonne Zima,
top-billed). Only as soon as Hannah gets on the boat Sienna makes clear her
intentions: all her life she’s been jealous of Hannah because she landed the
hot, rich, professionally successful Dr. Wilson and had two kids — Maya (Erica
Anderson), who’s now a high-school senior with her own anxieties about what’s
going to happen on her upcoming prom night (even though when the film starts
that’s still five months away) and in particular who her date will be; and
prepubescent son Luke (Manny Brenda).
Indeed, Sienna has spent her whole adult life
fixated on her cousin and her cousin’s husband’s prom night, at which they
actually announced their engagement, and she’s determined to re-create it with
herself in Hannah’s place. So she shoves Hannah off the boat and Hannah, who
somehow got to be old enough to be the mother of two kids (and, we later learn,
to live in a house with a swimming pool!) without ever learning how to swim.
Sienna drives the boat away and leaves Hannah to thrash about in the water as
best she can, and ultimately drown. From the moment it started with a murder and therefore let us know from the
get-go who the villain would be instead of boring us with a lot of long,
ponderous exposition the way many Lifetime scripts do, I liked that we were
watching a movie whose makers worshiped at the shrine of St. Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock made one whodunit early on in his
career — a 1930 British film called Murder! (not a very good movie but worth watching for the
performances of Herbert Marshall, Norah Baring and Esmé Percy; some quite
creative uses of sound — as far as I know it was the first talkie that featured
an actor’s voice on the soundtrack but without their lips moving to indicate
that the character was thinking, not actually speaking, those words — and an overall layer of sexual
and lifestyle kinkiness that’s quite appealing) — but thereafter he decided
that he was going to let the audience in from the get-go on what was really going on and who the good guys
(and the bad guys) were, and build suspense from when and how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when
they did.
Though they’re hardly at the level of Hitchcock or the various
writers he used, Carrière and Canning followed the same rule of construction: we know from the beginning that Sienna is a psycho
bitch who’s determined to replace her cousin in Tony’s affections and take over
Hannah’s life, wealth and family, but we’re kept in suspense about whether the characters will
find out and do something to stop Sienna in time before she knocks them off.
She shows up at Dr. Wilson’s home in Philadephia and, dripping with phony
“concern,” says she intends to stay there as long as it takes to put Dr.
Wilson’s broken family together. Luke treats Sienna as a sort of female Santa
Claus, indulgently spoiling him with toys, a basketball and a reprieve from
homework so they can watch a dinosaur movie together, and dad is relieved that
there’s someone else in the house to take up the slack now that his wife has
died in what he naïvely thinks was an “accident.” The two people in the Wilson
household who take a dislike to Sienna are daughter Maya and the Wilsons’
housekeeper, Janet Macturn (Heather Ted Mitchell), Maya because Sienna is
already acting like her mom and Maya doesn’t like it, and Janet because Sienna
is trying to take over from her in running the house and picking up the kids from school while dad is
working. Sienna finds a way to get rid of Janet when she discovers she’s
carrying a two-year sobriety chip — she spikes her drink cup with some sort of
household cleaner that has the same effect as alcohol and gets her busted for
drunk driving while Janet is in the car driving Jake home.
Though the police
department’s breathalyzer malfunctions that night and therefore the cops don’t
have an immediate readout of whatever it was Janet had in her system, Dr.
Wilson fires her for being irresponsible and having her relapse with his son in
her car. Then fate throws Sienna a curveball in the alluring female form of
Lauren King (Brianna Barnes), Dr. Wilson’s office assistant, who’s just been
setting up a business trip to Dallas on which she’ll accompany him. It’s
obvious both to Sienna and to us that Lauren, who’s just been through a breakup
with another doctor in Tony’s medical building, is hoping that while they’re
alone together on that trip proximity will work its magic and she’ll be on her
way to becoming the second Mrs. Dr. Tony Wilson. A few days before the trip,
however, Sienna overhears as Lauren decides to go for an early-morning workout
at her gym — and Sienna corners Lauren at the top of a staircase and pushes her
down, killing her and once again making it look like a simple accident.
Meanwhile, Maya is having problems of her own: she wants to go to the upcoming
prom with her sort-of boyfriend Jake Davis (Kyle Meagher, one of those pretty
little twinks who make a lot of Gay men my age go apeshit but does little for
me —frankly, Mark Lutz did way more for me as someone I’d like to dream about!), only Kat Merritt
(Madelyn Keys), a bitchy rival of Maya’s at school, gets Jake to invite her to the prom by “spoofing” Maya’s phone and sending
Jake a text that she’s not going to the prom and doesn’t mind if he takes
someone else.
Maya denies sending that text and Sienna takes her phone to a
young Black friend of hers named Ed (the actor playing him is unlisted on
imdb.com but he, too, is way sexier than Kyle Meagher!) who for some reason has the hots for Sienna
even though he looks more like Maya’s age. Ed proves that Kat sent Jake the
spoof text and gives Maya a screen shot, which leads Jake to dump Kat and offer
Maya her dream prom date instead. It’s a dream prom date night for Sienna as
well; she’s outfitted both herself and Maya with replicas of the blue dress Hannah
wore the night of her big prom
date with Tony, and she drugs Tony’s champagne so he’ll fall asleep for a bit
and when he wakes up, Sienna will be in his late wife’s prom dress and she’ll
be the spitting image of her, which will make him fall in love with her
instantly and allow Sienna to take Hannah’s place in Tony’s life. Only Tony has
utterly no interest in her “that way,” and when Sienna realizes that she
hog-ties him with duct tape and shoves him into the swimming pool in a scene I
suspect was at least a partial knock-off of the ending of Sunset Boulevard — especially when, thanks to quick action by Maya
and Jake, he’s rescued and the cops arrest Sienna and handcuff her while she’s
still babbling about how she and Tony were soulmates. The reason Maya and Jake
were able to catch on to Sienna in time is they were able to place a phone call
to Sienna’s mother Dorothy (a quite good performance by Lorilee Holloway), who
revealed that Sienna had always had a crush on Tony and had been fiercely jealous of Hannah and
probably killed her (a possibility the kids hadn’t thought of before).
As soon
as the rented limo Jake got them to drive up to the prom in style pulls up at
the venue, Maya realizes that her dad is in danger and tells the driver to take
them back to her place, where her dad is bobbing up and down in the pool to get
as much air as he can so he doesn’t immediately drown, and Sienna has stabbed
Jake in the chest (but, fortunately, nothing fatal or even life-threatening)
before he was able to grab her wrist and get the knife away from her. So Sienna
ends up … well, probably in a mental institution rather than a prison because
(like Gloria Swanson’s character in Sunset Boulevard) it’s hard to imagine she’ll be found sane enough
to stand trial for Lauren’s murder (the one she committed in Pennsylvania —
there’d be a jurisdictional snarl over trying her for killing Hannah because
she did that one in California).
Despite some of the usual Lifetime sillinesses — Sienna has an almost
supernatural power of being able to overhear whenever anyone is saying anything derogatory about her and, in
one lapse that rankled me, Jake addresses Tony as “Mr. Wilson” when he comes to
pick Maya up for the prom — surely, especially on a formal occasion like this,
he would have called him “Dr. Wilson” — Killer Prom is actually a pretty good Lifetime movie (even
though the title is something of a cheat because we never actually get to see
the prom). It’s highlighted by an unusually suspenseful story construction and
a great performance by Yvonne Zima
as Sienna. Yes, I know Lifetime
has made a specialty of depicting these sorts of superficially charming
psychos, but they’re rarely as well written or acted as this one. Helped by Canning’s unusually
(for Lifetime) complex and relatively subtle script (at least as far as the
writing of her part is concerned), Zima
does an excellent job of making this character believable.
