by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I wanted to watch
Lifetime’s “Premiere” movie at 8 last night, Psycho Escort, and though it wasn’t as crazy as the previous
night’s Deadly Mile High Club it also wasn’t anywhere nearly as much fun. This was one movie whose
promos made it seem a lot more exciting than it really was: workaholic accountant Diane Cooper
(Victoria Barabas — there’s a bad joke just waiting to be made on her last name but I’m not going to
make it) is about to be made partner in her firm despite the opposition of Kyle
(Max E. Williams), who’s middle-aged, white, has a dick and longs for the days
when those characteristics were actually advantages in the job market. But her personal life is
nonexistent; her husband died two years ago and she’s raising their son Jake
(Jacob Sandler) as a single mom, but the grief is still so strong she sleeps in
the guest room because she can’t bear going back to the bed she and her late
husband shared. She’s invited to a wine-tasting party at the home of the firm’s
managing partner, Garrett (Joseph C. Phillips), but she feels uncomfortable
going there without a man. Russell (Donovan Patton, top-billed on imdb.com),
her co-worker who obviously has a crush on her, is hoping she’ll invite him to be her date, but she
thinks it would be inappropriate to socialize with a co-worker.
Instead, at the
urging of her sister Lori (Kat Fairaway), she logs on to a Web site with the
pretentious and portentous name “The
Companionship Collective” which offers rent-a-boyfriends for women who need
them for social occasions. Under ordinary circumstances that would be a thinly
veiled front for prostitution, but this film’s creators — director Monika Lynn
Wesley and writers Marcy Holland (whom I’ve heard of before) and Kaila York
(whom I haven’t) — don’t give us a yes-or-no answer on that one. Diane’s
hook-up from the Companionship Collective turns out to be Miles (Nick Ballard,
who’s an O.K.-looking GQ model type but nowhere nearly as drop-dead gorgeous as Marc Herrmann in Deadly
Mile High Club — actually he looks like
Herrmann will probably look 10 years from now). Miles is an instant hit at the party,
where everyone assumes he’s Diane’s new boyfriend, and the fact that he’s able
to pose as an instant expert on virtually everything, from wine (he claims his grandfather was a
vintner) to golf (he claims to have a 10 handicap and later acknowledges it’s
8), baseball (he shows Little Leaguer Jake some pitchers and says he was
scouted for minor-league teams) and social work (he claims he’s a Big Brothers
volunteer, and isn’t) just adds to his appeal. For the most part Psycho
Escort is a surprisingly dull and
slow-moving film — whereas in Deadly Mile High Club we learned almost from the get-go that the Flight
Instructor from Hell was a crazy bitch willing to kill anyone she thought was
in her way, Miles doesn’t do anything even vaguely “psycho” until about midway
through the film, when he kidnaps Kyle and locks him in the trunk of a car. (Mesdames
Wesley, Holland and York
don’t bother to explain what happens to him after that.)
Of course he’s got the
genuine hots for Diane and wants to make her his permanent partner, and in
order to get her to bond with him he tells her that his wife died in a car
crash. What he doesn’t tell her
is that the two of them were in the car together and the accident happened just
after a confrontation in which she announced that she was having an affair and
was going to leave him for the other guy, and he freaked out and presumably
arranged the “accident” so she would die and he would live, though once again
the director and writers don’t nail that down for sure. About the only person
who’s suspicious that Miles is too good to be true is Lori, who researches him
online and finds the truth about the “accident” in which his wife died. The
director and writers throw us an intriguing red herring towards the end — Miles
shows up at the ballpark for Jake’s Little League practice and we’re sure,
based on innumerable previous Lifetime movies in which if the heroine in peril
is a single mom with a kid, the film will end with the bad guy kidnapping the
kid and the good girl forced to hunt him down to recover her child, but Jake
surprises Diane, her sister and us by returning home unscathed and going off on a sleepover that will at
least get him out of the house for the final confrontation between heroine and
villain. This happens when Diane decides to play up to Miles — earlier he’s
told her his real name is “Peter Dwyer” but that’s just another alias — and
pretend to yield to him, only at the crucial moment she pours some caustic
chemical from her bathroom into a glass and throws it in his face, then knocks
him out. (Of course I couldn’t help but joke that she should offer it to him as
a drink and say, “Here, drink this. The President says it will help you get
over COVID-19!”)
The director and writers shot this under the working title Lies
for Rent, which would have been
more haunting and a better reflection of what the movie is about, though they
also did their work so sloppily they might as well have called it Loose Ends
for Rent — and the final shot,
which is a close-up of Miles in the woods near Diane’s house having come to and
successfully escaped, though he’s still in the neighborhood and there’s a
chance the police will arrest him (but maybe they won’t and he’ll get away and
pull a similar scam somewhere else), is an annoying non-ending all too much of
a piece with what’s gone before it. Lifetime did the filmmakers no favors by
giving it such a sensationalistic title as Psycho Escort — one would expect that to be a film about an
escort who keeps knocking off his or her customers because they don’t want a permanent relationship from him — which
sets up sensationalistic expectations the film as it stands doesn’t even try to fulfill. This isn’t an unusually good Lifetime
movie and it isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good camp classic like Deadly Mile High Club, either; it’s just mediocre and dull, and while
better actors in the leads might have helped — Victoria Barabas never grabs the
contradictions in Diane’s character and Nick Ballard never convinces us (the
way Anthony Perkins did in Hitchcock’s Psycho, the film that set the template for the killer
underneath) that he’s got demons lurking under his nice exterior. If a scene
calls on him to be nice, he plays it that way; if he’s called on to be mean, he
does that; but he never makes Miles (or Peter, or whatever his name is) come to
life as a consistent character.
