by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on the TV for last night’s Lifetime “premiere” —
once again, Lifetime isn’t providing advance notice of who’s in this film
(aside from the two leading actors) or who the behind-the-scenes personnel
were, though I was able to scrawl some all too often illegible names on a slip
of paper and also reference imdb.com for a previous production by the same
writer-director, Chris Sivertson. The film was called Driven to the Edge — the title was a pun because the principal
character was a psychopathic woman, Jaye (I think Amanda Grace Benitez played
her, but so little information exists online on this film I can’t be sure), who
drives for a fictitious ride-share company called “Roller.” (Charles joked that
if “Roller” was a real-life company this film would have been bankrolled by the
real-life Uber company to scare people away from “Roller” and thereby drive
them out of business.) Jaye gets her kicks by locking the doors of people
unlucky enough to get into her car — she has so-called “child locks” that prevent
people from opening her car doors from inside unless she pushes a control
button to unlock them — and jamming their cell phones so they can’t call the
police or anyone else for help.
Then she takes them to deserted locations,
tortures them psychologically and physically, and kills them, while her
omnipresent security cameras (which record audio as well as video — Charles
said no real security cameras
record audio, but I daresay there are probably a few high-end ones that come
with microphones to capture sounds as well as sights), including the one
concealed inside her shades as well as the ones she’s got wired in her two
homes (a mansion she grabbed from her estranged husband Myles and — stop me if
you’ve heard this before — a deserted mountain cabin), so she can play back
recordings of her murders and therefore get her rocks off all over again. (A
surprising number of these sickos — including pedophiles — record their
actions, and often the police recover the recordings and they become the
primary evidence against them.) The opening scene shows a young (straight,
though the guy looked so effeminate at first I thought they were Lesbians)
couple making the mistake of necking in Jaye’s car, leading her to take them to
her mansion and clobber both of them with a baseball bat (Jaye’s favorite — but
not exclusive — means of murder, for reasons we don’t learn until the last few
minutes, along with the rest of What Makes Jaye Run). At first I thought she
was going to turn out to be a highly “moralistic” psycho driven to kill people
who dare do sexually raunchy things in her car — which would quite frankly have
made for a much better movie than the one we actually got.
Then we meet her
principal victim, a young woman named Tess (Taylor Spreitler) whom Jaye attaches
herself to and, though Sivertson’s script makes clear she’s not interested in making Tess her lover (even though
they end up spending one night together in bed, non-sexually, in the mansion)
but wants her as a sort of protégé. Tess is supposed to own her own fashion
business (though the clothes costume designer Morgan DeGroff put her in are
either impractical or downright ugly), though all we see of her at work is her
crouching on the floor of her studio with large, curved pieces of paper that
are supposed to represent a pattern) and Jaye tells people she sells real
estate (which she doesn’t). The cast of characters is oddly claustrophobic:
besides Tess and Jaye, the only other important people in the movie are Tess’s
friends Isaac and Olive (the sort of O.K.-looking but nerdy people you expect to see as second leads in a Lifetime movie), who met
when he picked her up in a
ride-share car and started dating (at one point Isaac talks about inventing a
combination ride-share and dating app); Tess’s out-of-town boyfriend Danny (not
a bad-looking guy but not that drop-dead gorgeous, either); and Myles, who
comes on the scene in mid-movie after Tess is leaving Jaye’s mansion following
her weird sleepover and confronts her, and who later gets offed by Jaye when he
threatens to give away her secret that she’s really a ride-share driver and not
a real-estate broker. (Why Jaye seems so worried that people will find that out about her and not that she’s a serial killer is
one of the many stupid plot holes in Sivertson’s script.)
As the movie
progresses (like a disease), Jaye offs Isaac and Myles with her omnipresent
baseball bat and stabs Danny repeatedly (in an unusually gory and explicit
scene for a Lifetime movie) with a shiv she’s made from a toothbrush handle.
She also kidnaps Olive and holds her hostage — though through much of the movie
we’re led to believe that she’s killed her, too — and at the end Jaye tricks
Tess into coming out to that deserted mountain cabin and tells her that Olive
has pleaded with Jaye to kill Tess instead of her (sort of like Winston Smith
betraying his girlfriend Julia in Room 101 at the end of George Orwell’s 1984) and Tess should therefore kill Olive instead while
Jaye has her conveniently tied up and available to strangle (since Jaye is smart
enough not to trust Tess with the baseball bat). In the end Tess and Olive
subdue Jaye and flee, but not before we get [spoiler alert!] as much of Jaye’s origin story as Sivertson is going
to give us. It seems that when Jaye was still a girl, her mother got her to
kill her abusive father by, you guessed it, clubbing him to death with a
baseball bat as he slept, on the idea that the cops (who literally never exist in this movie — we don’t see any law
enforcement personnel or any hint
that the successive disappearances of members of a small circle of friends
attract any attention from the authorities at all; this reminded me of the
preposterous Bela Lugosi Monogram vehicle The Invisible Ghost from 1941, in which for some reason Lugosi’s
character is never suspected of a string of murders even though all the victims are his servants), and as if that weren’t preposterous enough, Jaye also tells Tess
that she’s Jaye’s younger sister, separated from her and reared elsewhere (the
only “plant” for that was an earlier passing reference to Tess having been
adopted), though I’m still trying
to figure out whether Sivertson meant that to be story reality or just one more
of Jaye’s lies.
Sivertson does
attempt to give Jaye’s character some points of interest, including hearing an
incoherent babble of voices in her head (at least he didn’t do the Son of Sam
number and have her hallucinate that her dog was telling her to kill people!)
and having done an impressive amount of research on previous female serial
killers. But in the end this is one more Lifetime movie that’s done in by its
sheer improbability, and it’s yet another movie in which the director is also
the writer and therefore has no one but himself to blame. Indeed, I wish Sivertson had had another director on the project —
a second voice to tell him, “Don’t you think you’re really overdoing this?” Charles put it into the
bad-movie-that-could-have been
good, and it does have its points — among them some quite effective neo-Gothic
cinematography by Chris Heinrich and an O.K. performance by Benitez or whoever
is playing the psycho (she’s particularly effective at making the character
convincingly butch in some scenes and feminine in others). But overall it’s yet
another confirmation of Hitchcock’s Law: Alfred Hitchcock never made another
whodunit after his early talkie Murder! (1930) and for the rest of his career he preferred stories in which he
would let the audience know up
front who was who and what was really going on, while the suspense would come
from how and when the characters
would find out, and what would happen to them when they did. Sivertson played part of the Hitchcock game in Driven to the
Edge — at least he let us know Jaye was a
psycho from the moment we saw her — but when Hitchcock did this sort of story
in Psycho he took his time to let
us know Norman Bates was a murderer but gave away his motive (like Jaye, Norman
had been induced by his mom to kill his dad and that had permanently warped his
brain) considerably earlier, to much better effect.
