At 8 last night I watched a Lifetime movie whose title seemed to be the result of a brainstorming session among Lifetime’s regular writers to come up with the absolutely silliest possible title for a Lifetime movie: Psycho Yoga Instructor. It was written by Robert Black and directed by Brian Herzlinger, who apparently has enough of a reputation that he gets a possessory credit (“A Brian Herzlinger Film”) and Panos Vlahos (which sounds like something you’d order at a Greek restaurant), who plays the title role, gave a comment on one of the Web sites I looked up for information about this film to the effect that he was really looking forward to the chance to work with such a well-regarded director. What Black and Herzlinger came up with was a so totally by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller you could practically write it yourself: Justine “Jessie” Grace (Ashley Wood, top-billed) is a schoolteacher facing the ennui of her summer break. She’s unhappily married to attorney Tom Grace (Brady Smith), who’s so busy that he’s often going out of town, and even on the rare occasions when he is in town he’s set up a home office in their house so he can work from home, which he does so far into the wee hours he sleeps far more often at his office chair or on the couch he’s equipped the home office with than in the bed he nominally shares with his wife.
The other big flash point in their relationship is their inability to have children — we’re eventually told the biological problem is his, not hers — which has led them to a frustrating round of calling adoption agencies and even picking out potential adoptees, only to have the agency personnel tell them that for whatever unspecified but unappealable criteria they use, they’ve deemed the Graces an unsuitable “match” for the baby they were ready to adopt and raise. (The near-fascistic attitudes of adoption agencies towards prospective parents — as well as the very real dangers to the children involved if an agency guesses wrong — are the stuff of quite a few movies in this genre, and some real-life situations as well: Joan Crawford couldn’t pass the parental suitability tests of the above-board adoption agencies of her time, and so she got her four kids through bootleg child brokers.) The combination of an absent husband and the collapse of her plan to adopt leaves Justine devastated, so her best friend Ginnie (Lily Rains) suggests she start taking yoga classes as a way of getting more centered and getting her mind off the traumas in her life. So she does that, only she makes the mistake of enrolling in a class led by Mr. Psycho Yoga Instructor himself.
His name is Domenic Romero (Panos Vlahos) — at
least that’s the name he’s using now — and his schtick, as we learn eventually (very eventually — the film is half over before Domenic
does anything that even looks vaguely psycho and it’s only at the three-quarter mark that we get the
definitive evidence that he’s dangerous and out to menace and quite possibly do
in Our Heroine), is to fasten on an unhappily married woman in his class, offer
her private instruction, romance and seduce her, get her to leave her husband
for him, and then at best abandon her and at worst kill her. We see him fulfill
this pattern with Justine to the point of giving her “private” training at her
home (one of their sessions is interrupted by the sudden return of her husband,
who on this of all days decided he was going to swing home and eat lunch there
instead of a restaurant or in his workplace office) and kissing her, though
writer Black makes sure the only
reason good little Justine was even tempted to have an affair with Domenic the Psycho Yoga
Instructor was she thought her husband was cheating on her, via a phone message from a woman identified only as
“S.” which she spotted on his phone. It turns out “S.” was merely a woman named
Stephanie who runs an adoption agency that competes with the one that’s already
rejected the Graces and whom Tom was sounding out for a potential child for
them, but in the meantime the damage has been done and that one kiss has
convinced Domenic that he and Justine are soulmates and he’ll literally do anything to possess her — or to kill her if he can’t.
Since
the film has featured a number of nightmares Justine has had in her bed
(especially during all those lonely nights she’s had to sleep in it alone even
though she’s not only at least nominally married but her husband is at least there in the house!) in which she drowns — she’s been
having them even before she
started taking yoga and met Domenic and she has another one afterwards in which
she and Domenic are having hot sex on the bathroom counter while her husband
desperately struggles to get out of the tub where he’s drowning (the only soft-core porn scene we get since
Black stresses that she and Domenic never actually do the down-’n’-dirty with each other — thereby denying
himself a much more potentially powerful dramatic issue than the ones he
actually used, more on that later) — of course the desperate climax happens in
the bathroom, where Domenic is holding a knife to Justine’s neck and
threatening to kill her if she doesn’t agree to love him and leave her husband
for him. Eventually Justine escapes long enough for the cops — summoned by
Lily, who researched Domenic’s background online and found his real name was
Sebastian Nikos but he’s worked under several aliases, in one of which he
called himself “Elijah” and ruined the life of a woman who confronts him in his
class session (alas not one
Justine is attending!) and tells him (and us) she left her husband and children
to be with him, and then he rejected her and fled.
Justine’s life is saved, she
and Tom reconcile and he tells her that it looks like that mysterious adoption
agency called “S.” has actually found them a suitable child and will let them
become parents at long last. Unfortunately, Black decided to end the film with
one of those maddening Lifetime endings in which Domenic, Sebastian, Elijah or
whatever his name is escapes and sets up shop in another town, where he’s heard
going through the same moth-eaten spiels he was using on Justine’s class at the
beginning. Where I had thought
this was going was that Domenic and Justine actually would have sex together and he’d get her pregnant —
thereby leaving both her and Tom in a horrible dilemma: abort the child after
they’ve been hoping for one for so long, or raise it as their own and leave Tom
with the long-term knowledge that the only way he was able to become a father
was for his wife to have an affair and he’s raising someone else’s baby but not in the way he had anticipated and hoped for. And of
course they’d also be worried that their child would inherit the
psychopathologies of his or her real dad.
One other thing that disappointed me
about Psycho Yoga Instructor was
that there was virtually no background about Domenic’s character, no indication
of what made him “run,” no hints of ghastly happenings in his childhood that
shaped him into becoming the monster he was. Christine Conradt would have given
us something to explain him and
maybe even make us feel a little sorry for him — I like dramatic ambiguity and
I also think it’s good storytelling to give your villain some minor human
qualities that make him quasi-likable so when he does go off the rails and start doing evil things, it’s
more of a shock. It’s also curious that this film’s casting director picked (or
got stuck with) two not very attractive people for both the male leads: instead of the tall, lanky,
sandy-haired type Lifetime usually hires to play the innocent milquetoast
husbands, Brady Smith is built like a linebacker and has the sort of face that
makes him look like he worked his way through law school by prizefighting and
did that about a year or two too long. And Panos Vlahos looks appropriately sexy at first but ultimately he seems
just too disheveled and seedy to attract the sort of bored women in unhappy
marriages we’re told are his “type.” The film was shot under the working title The
Perfect Pose — a marvelous play on words
(“pose” meaning a yoga position and also the false identity Domenic assumes to
go after his female prey), but time and time again the mavens at Lifetime have
changed an ironic and compelling title to one that makes it all too plain and
obvious what the movie is about.
