A Predator Returns (Johnson Production Group, Synthetic Cinema International, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime showed a “premiere” that actually turned out to be the third in a series: A Predator Returns, part of a cycle that started in 2017 with a film called Stalker’s Prey and continued in 2020 with a movie called A Predator’s Obsession. All three films in the cycle were directed by Colin Theys and written by John Doolan, though the identity of the actor playing the titular psycho predator changed from Mason Dye in Stalker’s Prey to Houston Stevenson in the later two films. (I first got attracted – in both senses – to Mason Dye when he played the lead in the first film in Lifetime’s Flowers in the Attic, though in that cycle too he was replaced by another actor, that time Wyatt Nash, in the subsequent installments based on V. C. Andrews’ five-novel Dollanganger family cycle.) This morning I looked up my moviemagg posts on the two previous films in the cycle – Stalker’s Prey at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/03/stalkers-prey-stargazer-films-synthetic.html and A Predator’s Obsession at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-predators-obsession-aka-stalkers-prey.html – and realized just how blatantly Theys and Doolan had copied from their own previous work. It’s also clear they had studied the work of the Master of Suspense, St. Alfred Hitchcock, since Theys’s direction is full of Hitchcockian ripoffs – from the shots of characters confronting each other on staircases to the final scene, a stone copy of the ending of Hitchcock’s Saboteur in which the villain is dangling from the top of a tall structure. In Saboteur it was the Statue of Liberty, and here it’s a lighthouse. (One wonders if Lifetime’s movie library has copies of all Hitchcock’s major films so their writers and directors can turn to them for, uh, inspiration.)

A Predator Returns starts out off the coast of an unnamed Eastern U.S. community (though whether it’s New England – the locale of Jaws, another movie that was a big influence on this cycle – or the South remains unclear, and it was called “Hunter’s Cove” in the first film), where there’s a pile of rocks sticking out of the middle of the sea called Faron Island. The island and the area around it have been declared off limits to the locals by the authorities, partly because the island is pretty much just a pile of rocks (easy to slip off of and fall) and also because there’s a colony of sharks who have made the waters off Foron their principal feeding grounds. Only the titular predator, whose real name was Bruce Cain but called himself “Daniel” in A Predator’s Obsession and “David Burke” here, has established a camp there and regularly sets out on his boat to observe the sharks. He claims to be there as part of a university team doing research on the sharks, but a busybody attempting to enforce the ban on visitors to Faron shows up and demands to see the papers that will identify “David” as a legitimate scholastic researcher. I was half-expecting David to act like the bandit disguising himself as a cop in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and say, “Papers? I don’t got to show you no steenking papers!” Instead he puts the guy off with a series of lame excuses that just get his suspicions up until finally David uses his favorite murder method on him: he overpowers him, knocks him out, makes sure he’s bleeding and throws him overboard into the water so his pet sharks will eat him.

Meanwhile we also meet the high-school senior who’s going to become David a.k.a. Daniel a.k.a. Bruce’s latest love (or lust) obsession: Courtney Shayne (Leigha Sinnott), who goes out there as part of a four-person crew of equally stupid teenagers led by Ryan (Chris Jehnert), who obviously wants to be Courtney’s boyfriend (and who’s cute in a tousled-haired way but no match for Our Predator in the butchness or hotness departments!) and a Black couple of equal stupidity and naïveté, Courtney’s best friend Kat (Amber James) and her boyfriend Peter (Jonathan Cruz). They insist not only on sailing to the coast of the forbidden Faron Island but diving in the water and pushing each other overboard as a “joke” despite the island’s reputation (which got it forbidden in the first place) as overlooking a feeding ground for sharks. One sees these nice but incredibly dumb young people and hope they don’t live long enough to reproduce and pass their sorry-ass genes to another generation. Anyway, Courtney falls into the water and is about to be attacked by the sharks when David swoops in on his own boat and saves her life – and of course is immediately smitten with her because she’s not only hot to trot, she also reminds him of his lost love Alison, whom he obsessed over in the backstory to the whole cycle before deliberately running his car off the road and crashing it, sparing himself but leaving her dead. Since then he’s tried that with at least one other person in installment two, though this time he mostly hangs out at the Faron Island lighthouse (which, we’re repeatedly told, is automated, so its lights go on and off and its sirens ring but not necessarily via any human controller). He starts dating Courtney and even makes it to bed with her – though he’s also living in a house he previously shared with his now-deceased mother, whom he has long conversations with and even offers her meals. (We eventually get a glimpse of towards the end as a desiccated corpse in a canopy bed – didn’t I tell you this movie contained a lot of Hitchcock ripoffs? Well, at least he doesn’t don drag and kill people in his mother’s persona the way Norman Bates did in Psycho!)

Courtney is also the daughter of divorced parents Branden (Matthew Crawley) and Erica (Hannah Jane MacMurray) Shayne, though Branden seems to hang around the home of Courtney and Erica so much I was startled when writer Doolan dropped a line of dialogue that indicated they were no longer a couple. As typical in Lifetime movies with teen protagonists, the lead’s mother is depicted as parenting her with all the warmth and compassion of a commandant at Auschwitz, tearing into her for coming home late as if she’s about to send her to a gas chamber and insisting that she not have any fun but devote herself entirely to schoolwork and landing a scholarship so she can go to college, since she’s doing well enough academically to get into a high-class institution but doesn’t have the money for one. Given the non-support she’s getting from her mom and the hapless attempts of her dad to get her mom to lighten up on her – and also given the allure of his mysterious past, the appeal of a man who deals with sharks for a living (at least that’s what she thinks he does!) and the sheer hot hunkiness of Houston Stevenson’s bod, it’s no wonder that Courtney falls hard enough for him not only to have sex with him but, we soon learn, to get impregnated by him. She shares this information with her friend Kat but swears her to secrecy – though somehow David finds out because he posts it online and pretty soon everyone in Courtney’s high school knows she got knocked up and is giving her the cold shoulder over it.

One of David’s peculiar quirks is he insists on never being photographed, but it turns out Kat snapped a Polaroid photo (an oddly retro bit of technology for a film made and set in 2021!) of him and she offers it to Courtney – but, in the usual way of a Lifetime heroine’s African-American best friend, she’s killed by David before she can share the photo. The murder scene is actually quite inventively directed by Theys: it takes place after the rehearsal of a school play and involves him catching Kat backstage in the school theatre and tormenting her Phantom of the Opera-style before he finally offs her. Meanwhile, in his most creative plot twist of the entire movie, Doolan throws us an interesting variant on the basic plot of Lolita: Courtney’s mom Erica decides to log on to an online dating service to find a new man in her life. (She doesn’t know that David has already killed her ex – he lured him to the lighthouse, knocked him out, tied a weight to his body and threw him into the shark pit – and when Branden figured out how to unhook the weight and swim to the surface, David shot him not with an ordinary firearm but with, of all things, a harpoon gun, which creates the necessary blood-letting for the sharks to find him irresistible and consume him. At least this spares David the annoying and risky task most movie murderers have of disposing of the victim’s body.)

Erica’s new man duly shows up – and it’s David a.k.a. Daniel a.k.a. Bruce, having grown a moustache and beard to make himself look older in his online photo. Mom is as smitten with the psycho predator as her daughter was – like Humbert Humbert, he’s got access to the daughter by romancing her mother, and the reason Courtney wanted the photo of David was to prove to her mom that her new boyfriend and Courtney’s previous one were the same person – though given that the original Stalker’s Prey established that the psycho’s dad was a Hunter’s Cove City Councilmember one would think the family was prominent enough that at least some of the townspeople would have seen Bruce Cain, remembered what he looked like and recognized him in his later incarnations. It all comes to a head when both Courtney and Erica confront David in his digs, see his mom in her current state and have a fight to the finish that ends up with Theys’s Saboteur quote – the bad guy dangling off the edge of the lighthouse and Courtney attempting to pull him up (presumably she wants him arrested, not dead or disappeared) but losing control of him as his body plunges from the top of the lighthouse into the water, where one thinks his destiny will be to end up as shark food.

Then again, given that he’s already survived two seemingly certain brushes with death at the ends of the previous movies, one can’t help but wonder if Colin Theys and John Doolan have in mind a Stalker’s Prey 4, presumably with Bruce Cain in yet another identity hunting down Courtney to find the whereabouts of their baby and kidnap it. A Predator Returns is O.K. Lifetime, notable for the genuinely suspenseful scenes director Theys was able to cook up out of Doolan’s mishmash of a plot (though Doolan too rises to a surprising level of quality in some of the lines, notably a monologue in which David talks about the mercilessness of sharks as predators, in which they’re always competing for food and killing off the weaker sharks – he even claims that before they’re born alpha sharks will kill their weaker fellows in the womb. I have no idea whether that’s scientifically true, but it makes the villain a more convincing and chilling character) and Houston Stevenson has a sort of boy-next-door charm that makes it believable that so many people are taken in by him. He’s also hot enough that it’s fun to watch him in his soft-core porn scene with Leigha Sinnott, especially since Doolan wrote it so she is the sexual aggressor!