by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 byMark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The next movie on Lifetime’s “Wrongfully Yours” weekend, The
Wrong Student, was considerably better.
David DeCoteau’s direction, pretty standard on The Wrong Housesitter, was genuinely suspenseful and almost Gothic at
times even though this is a modern-dress story about high school, and writers
Schenck, Sullivan and Walsh created some fairly interesting character conflicts
and background that set this one above the usual Lifetime sludge. The most
interesting thing they did is to kill off the parents of both the high-school girls who are the female leads,
Amber Halligan (Kennedy Tucker) and Madeleine Sawyer (Evanne Friedmann).
Amber’s parents both died in a car crash, whereupon her one surviving relative,
Kelly Halligan (Jessica Morris, who for my money is a good deal hotter and
sexier than the bland nymphet playing her niece!), Amber’s aunt on her father’s
side, but Amber is bitter not only about losing her parents but her aunt moving
her clear across country from New York to California because Kelly is partners
with Gibson (Vivica A. Fox) in some sort of Internet business aimed at
creatives and she’s decided to overcome her shock at the loss of her brother and sister-in-law
by relocating to California so she and Gibson can be business partners in
person instead of trying to run the company from two separate coasts.
As for
Madeleine, her parents both
burned to death in a house fire two years earlier, and she successfully sought
legal emancipation, so she lives alone and has just turned 18. The high school
Amber and Madeleine are attending has just hired a new soccer coach, a
professional soccer player named Dominic Antal (Jason-Shane Scott again, with
director DeCoteau once more giving us some choice shots of his pecs and the
gloriously thick nipples that adorn them), though the school’s athletic
director, hatchet-faced Coach Hendricks (Helene Udy), doesn’t like him and
insists that she’s going to get the school board to fire him once his one-year
contract is up. She also let slip that she’s deathly allergic to peanuts, so
Madeleine eliminates her by spiking her brown-bag lunch sandwich with peanut
oil and boosting her EpiPen (shown on screen as “EpPen” because the pharmaceutical
extortionists who have jacked up the price of this device tenfold also
apparently wouldn’t allow their trademark to be used in this film) from her
purse so she can’t get at it. Like Kristen in The Wrong Housesitter, Madeleine “spoofs” Amber’s phone so she can lure
fellow student Riley Jones (Ryan Moore, who looks like he’s at least in his
20’s even though he’s playing a high-school boy) to a deserted park and kill
him, then frame Amber for the crime. The case is caught by police detectives
Andrade (William McNamara) and Mauro (Galyn Görg), a middle-aged woman whose
face looks like it’s seen better days, and Andrade is sure Amber killed Riley
over a drug deal gone bad while Mauro isn’t so sure. Meanwhile Amber’s Aunt
Kelly has become attracted to the hunky soccer coach and has started to date
him — much to the fury of Madeleine, who’s decided she will get the hot coach no matter how many people she
has to kill and how much damage she has to do to have him.
Madeleine killed
Riley with a fish-gutting knife we see so much of it almost becomes a character
in itself — she’d seen Riley break into her house and spot the traditional wall
of photos she’s posted to show her obsession with Dominic, a very old movie device and one that ought to have long
since been retired — and later she threatens Amber with the same knife. She
also throws a rock through the front window of Kelly’s and Amber’s home, and
she’s written on the rock with marking pen, “LEAVE DOMINIC ALONE.” When Kelly
doesn’t leave Dominic alone — indeed, when
she invites him in after he’s just come back from a party where Madeleine asked
him to drive her home because she was drunk, only her real agenda was to make a pass at him, Madeleine decides
to extract her revenge by breaking into the office of Kelly’s and Gibson’s
business and destroying their computer server, thus putting their Web site out
of business for weeks. This is an example of Lifetime’s writers giving their
villainesses almost supernatural powers: 1) How did Madeleine even know where Kelly’s
and Gibson’s office was? 2) How
did she know where the servers were? 3) Aren’t Internet servers usually at
remote locations in the so-called “cloud” anyway? And 4), since we haven’t seen
any evidence that Madeleine is taking computer science, how would she know how
to destroy a Web-based business that thoroughly? Nonetheless, Madeleine
proceeds with the rest of her revenge plan: she overpowers Amber and tells
Kelly, when she shows up and tries to rescue her niece, that she intends to
burn down the house and make it look like an accident killed both of them.
(Hardened Lifetime watchers were probably already suspecting that Madeleine
became an orphan in the first place by burning down her home and killing her
parents inside it, though Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Walsh never specify
that one way or the other.)
It ends with Gibson, who like most of Vivica A.
Fox’s characters is the intelligent, sensible Black woman who tries to talk the
white characters out of all the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime
movies to have plots at all (though she gets to play a professional instead of
a maid, I’d argue that Fox is really the modern-day heir to Hattie McDaniel and
her “Mammy” roles in that regard), finally doing something sensible —like calling the police, who ultimately
overpower and arrest Madeleine so the rest of the high-school soccer team can
continue and Kelly and Coach Dominic can finally get it on. As formulaic and sometimes silly as The
Wrong Student sometimes get, the fact that both Amber and Madeleine have lost both their parents
gives it a haunted, almost doomed air — though the writers could have made that
even stronger if they’d had the two girls bond over their shared tragedies
until Amber slowly discovers Madeleine’s true nature — and one thing I
particularly liked about this film in general and DeCoteau’s direction in
particular is he did not make
Evanne Friedmann play Madeleine with the relentless perkiness Lifetime usually
imposes on its high-school girl psychos. Instead Friedmann gives Madeleine a
dark, haunted quality that makes her more dangerous but also makes us feel
almost sorry for her; it’s an amazing performance that deserved a more complex,
multidimensional script, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Evanne Friedmann
manages to rise to feature-film roles the way Hilary Swank broke out of the
Lifetime ghetto (in 1996 she starred in the Lifetime movie Terror in
the Family, playing a violent teenage girl
who literally has her parents
terrorized) into feature roles and an Academy Award.
