by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. Charles and I watched yet another
Lifetime movie, My Husband’s Deadly Past,
a really dorky title that misled the audience because, as Charles pointed out
after the movie was over, the dark secret in the heroine’s husband’s past was
something that happened only a few days previously and was hardly as distant as
the term “deadly past” made it seem. The film was shot under the working title Woman
on the Edge, which is far more generic (a lot of Lifetime movies could have been called Woman
on the Edge!) but also is more evocative
and less openly revealing … but that is definitely not Lifetime’s title strategy! Written by Paul A.
Burkett — a name I think I’ve
seen on Lifetime credits before, but not as ubiquitously as I’ve seen Christine
Conradt, Peter Sullivan, J. Bryan Dick, Ken Sanders or Michael Feifer — and
directed by Troy Scott, My Husband’s Deadly Past is about a woman named Karen Croft (Sarah Butler,
who for some reason is relegated to the “Other Cast” section on imdb.com even
though she’s playing the lead!) and her husband, famous psychotherapist Dr.
Otto Croft (Peter Benson), who specializes in hypnosis as a therapy to treat
alcoholism and drug addiction. When the movie begins Karen Croft is convinced
she murdered a local college student named Gina Navarro (Kimi Alexander — yes,
this is another Lifetime movie in which a character is dead at the outset but
is seen so often during flashbacks they needed someone to play her), and every
so often she sees people either on the street or at work (she’s a certified
public accountant for a company called International Creatives) who resemble
Gina.
The sight freaks her out every time and causes her to blow off a meeting
at her job with her boss — a ferocious heavy-set blonde woman named Doreen (Deborah
Finkel) — and an Asian investor whom Doreen is hoping to bring into the firm as
an investor and partner because it’s about to go under unless she finds new
capital somewhere. Karen sees a
woman in the office who looks like Gina, gets sick and leaves the meeting, the
Asian investor pulls out and Doreen sends Karen a text message reading, “I hope
you’re feeling better, because you’re fired.” The next time we see Karen she’s
on top of a dam (this is in Seattle, Washington, though I suspect the locale was
chosen so it could be filmed across the border in Canada), walking uncertainly
on its ledge, seemingly about to commit suicide, when she’s rescued by E.R. Dr.
Hugh Gossett (Brendon Zub), who looks enough like Peter Benson (only with a
fuller beard) that at first I thought they were the same man — he’d just gone
to wearing a less prominent beard — and this was a flashback showing how Otto
and Karen first met. Actually the Crofts have been together long enough they
have a teenage daughter, Jordan (Maddy Hillis), and she has a best friend named
Ruth (Karis Cameron) who in some ways is the most interesting character in the
movie. Ruth is a large, voluptuous blonde, reminiscent at least physically of
Marilyn Monroe (who if she were alive today would no doubt be told by casting
directors to slim herself down to the approximate dimensions of an Auschwitz
survivor if she hoped to get parts!), tall and dressed by costume designer
Cassandra Shier in all her scenes in skin-tight blue jeans that do an excellent
job of showing off her, shall we say, womanly charms. (I was finding her sexy — and I’m Gay!) Though Birkett’s
script gives her precious little to do, Ruth is in way over her head sexually; though she insists she’s 18
and therefore within the age of consent, she acknowledges to Jordan that boys
her own age do nothing for her and she wants a “more mature man — like your
dad!”
Not surprisingly, it turns out that Ruth is having an affair with Jordan’s dad — as, we
eventually learn, was the mysterious Gina Navarro until Karen caught her and
Otto in flagrante delicto. Otto’s
response to this was [spoiler alert!] to kill Gina himself, then hypnotize his wife into thinking she did it
and planting evidence to frame her. He also hypnotized her to jump off that dam
and kill herself so the cops would assume she killed Gina and then took her own
life out of guilt — only that damned E.R. doc saved her and the two of them
team up to prove her innocence so Otto can get what’s coming for him and Hugh
and Karen can get together (which they do surprisingly quickly even for a
Lifetime script). They end up as fugitives from justice — probably the most
unlikely such pair since the probation officer and the parolee he fell in love
with in Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof
— though at one point they joke to each other, “Being Bonnie and Clyde isn’t as
much fun as they male it look in the movies.” (Given that Bonnie Parker and
Clyde Barrow both died at the end, in real life and in the movie, it wasn’t that much fun for them, either.) Fortunately the Seattle police detective
in charge of the case, Chandra (Lucia Walters), starts piecing things together
and realizes the husband is the real killer, and the climax takes place at Dr.
Croft’s home. He’s decided to hypnotize his daughter Jordan to kill Hugh (who’s
come out to the house with Karen) and then herself, but Ruth (ya remember Ruth?) picks that moment to come to her lover’s home,
sees Otto hypnotizing Jordan and gets cold-cocked with the butt of Otto’s gun
to shut her up, after which Otto decides to add Ruth to the list of people he’s
going to tell his daughter to kill. (Throughout the hypnotic suggestion Otto
insists to his daughter that she’s not really harming anyone since the gun is
loaded with blanks — even though we
know the shells are live.) Detective Chandra shows up in the nick of time and
takes Otto, Karen and Jordan in
custody, after calling for an ambulance for Hugh, who was merely wounded, not killed, by Jordan’s shot.
The finale shows
Karen, Hugh and Jordan together en famille, though a) one has to wonder what there is about Karen that has such a
“thing” for doctors — especially tall, lanky, sandy-haired doctors — and b)
whether Hugh will prove to be just as much of a rotter as Otto (who was
arrested alive and we’re told is in jail — fortunately Birkett and director
Scott spared us the tag scene I was dreading in which Otto would start
hypnotizing people in prison and ultimately use his hypnotic power to get one
or more of the guards to help him escape) and will start playing around on her
and knocking off his paramours if she catches him with them. My
Husband’s Deadly Past would have lived up
to its title more if the script had portrayed Dr. Otto Croft as a serial killer
who’s done this sort of thing often — not only murdering an inconvenient
alternate girlfriend but using his hypnotic skills to set up someone else to
take the fall — and it also suffered from the usual flaw of movies about
hypnosis: it makes the hypnotist’s power over his subjects seem far greater
than it is in real life. Still, it was a nice bit of good clean dirty fun in
the best Lifetime manner; while it didn’t transcend the Lifetime formulae the
way the really good Lifetime movies like Restless Virgins or The Bride He Bought Online have, it did play around with them in neat and engaging ways.
