Dangerous Medicine (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

The next film on Lifetime’s schedule was at least a bit better, though it also suffered from the unwitting silliness a lot of Lifetime movies take on when they start tapping the network’s favorite cliché banks. It was called Dangerous Medicine, which led me to expect a Stalked by My Doctor-style melodrama in which a psycho doctor goes after an innocent, nubile young female patient. Instead the film could well have been called Psycho Caregiver, since the central character is Daphne Jones (Leann Van Mol), a visiting nurse who takes care of a hot young man named Tony Fox (Chris Cimperman). Tony was riding in a car being driven by his girlfriend Jasmine (Chloe Stafford), a young Black girl (it’s noteworthy that, as in a number of other Lifetime movies, the film presents an interracial relationship and doesn’t make a big deal of it). The two are discussing their relative chances of getting into college – Tony, a student athlete, is virtually assured of a track scholarship but Jasmine is worried that she won’t be able to afford to get into Stanford, where she’s determined to take a pre-med program and ultimately become a doctor. Alas, while she’s driving she gets a text from a college recruiter and, rather than take Tony’s sensible suggestion that if she wants to read it immediately she should pull over, she opens her phone, loses control of her car and crashes. She emerges unscathed but he’s paralyzed in the legs – he can still move them but they will no longer support his weight – and his mom Ellen (Meredith Thomas) hires Daphne as his caregiver.

Alas, it soon becomes apparent that Daphne has far more than a professional interest in Tony: she gives him thigh massages, getting awfully close to his cock (which we’re obviously supposed to think still works even though his legs don’t), and then she bathes him and practically jacks him off in the water. Daphne tries her best to break Tony and Jasmine up, pointing out that Daphne will be attending college at the other end of the country and will no doubt find a whole bunch of cute (and intact) boys to date there and will forget about the cripple back home. She also blurts out at the Fox dinner table that, after all, Jasmine is responsible for Tony’s disability since she caused the accident that crippled him, something Ellen didn’t want brought up but Jasmine readily admits her responsibility and said she’s had to think of it “every other day.” (I guess “every day” would have been too clichéd even for Lifetime.) At one of the conversations chez Fox, Daphne slips up and calls Tony “Kyle,” explaining that that was the name of a previous client. Meanwhile, Tony and his mom Ellen learn that a nearby surgeon named Dr. Peters (Matthew Pohlkamp) has invented a procedure that just might enable Tony to walk and even run again, though it’s complicated and if it goes wrong it might just leave him more disabled. Tony is gung-ho to go through this surgery but, when a slot on Dr. Peters’ schedule opens up and his office contacts the Foxes, the call is intercepted by Daphne, who never lets either Tony or Ellen know that the opportunity for the super-surgery became available. A week later Ellen Fox receives a call from Dr. Peters’ office, asking why she didn’t respond to their earlier call and saying that when she didn’t call back, they had to give that slot on Dr. Peters’ schedule to the next patient in line. Now it seems like Tony will have to wait another year for a chance for the super-operation to open up again.

Ellen is so angry at Daphne not having given her the message that she fires her, but in the meantime Tony has fallen in love with her and Daphne figures out a way to get back into Tony’s good graces. She sneaks into the Foxes’ home (they seem to have no sense of security – even when they lock their front doors they leave their back ones open – and Daphne has this bizarre knack of sneaking into other people’s bedrooms, stealing their phones and sabotaging them while the victim sleeps through the whole thing, though when she tries that at Jasmine’s place to send a phony text that Tony can’t “perform” any more and therefore she’s available for other men, a heavy-set Black guy who’s obviously Jasmine’s dad tries to chase her down in his house but fails) and pulls the gas connections so Tony will be asphyxiated – only she’s really doing this so she can return a few hours later, break into the house and rescue him à la Munchhausen’s. Naturally, the belief that Daphne saved his life makes Tony even more enamored of her, and when Ellen not only fires Daphne but makes it clear she’s no longer welcome in their house, Daphne says that’s all right: she’ll just have Tony (who’s already 18 and therefore above the age of consent) move in with her. Only in the meantime Jasmine is tracing the mysterious “Kyle,” whose name is tattooed on Daphne’s arm in Japanese characters (though Daphne says the characters are Chinese and mean “peace and love”).

She finds that Daphne’s legal last name is “Edwards” and calls down a long list of people named Kyle Edwards until she finds her former client, who’s still alive (in the opening prologue it had been hinted that he was dead; indeed, writers Doug Campbell, David Nathan Schwartz and Michael J. MacDonough cleverly sent us off the scent in a prologue in which a woman we later remember was Daphne is being chased through the forest by a heavy-set man with a moustache and a beard: at first we assume Daphne is an innocent victim and the man and his daughter, whom we also see, were tormenting her, but later we learn that the man was Kyle’s brother Nathan, played by Butch Klein, and he was getting back at Daphne for nearly murdering Kyle, then telling his daughter, “At least she won’t be coming around again”), who tells her that when he wanted out of their marriage Daphne threatened to cut off his arms so he could never get away again, a macabre plot twist that reminded me of those kinky late-1920’s melodramas Tod Browning and his writers thought up for Lon Chaney, Sr. (most notably The Unknown, in which Chaney played a circus performer who posed as the “Armless Wonder” and attracted Joan Crawford, who played a young woman who insisted that she never wanted to be held in someone’s arms; in the end a desperate Chaney tries to win her by having his arms amputated for real, only to find that Crawford’s character has fallen for a guy with all his limbs intact and has no problem with him holding her!).

In the end Daphne kidnaps Tony and takes him to, you guessed it, a deserted mountain cabin, and Tony’s mom Ellen and Jasmine set off in search of them. They finally get the clue they need from Kyle, who recalls that Daphne’s grandfather left her a property in the mountains that had once been a hippie commune (I suspect the current addiction of Lifetime writers for setting their climaxes in deserted mountain cabins was so they can get their characters out of range of cell phones) and is able to tell them where it is. Tony comes to as Daphne has drugged him, tied him to a bed and is about to cut off his arms the way she wanted to do with Kyle (and almost did until Nathan and Nathan’s daughter caught her, leading to that scene in the prologue of Nathan chasing her through the woods and ultimately, alas, losing her). She’s even done a Web search for a page called “How to Amputate an Arm” (I just did that and got some intriguing responses, including a medical training video on YouTube and a page on how to amputate your own arm in case you’re ever in an accidental situation where you would need to), though what she’s threatening to do the operation with looks like a common hand saw you’d find in a tool kit instead of something medical (then again when she tried it on Kyle she was going to use an ax!), and she’s about to do the dirty deed when Ellen and Jasmine show up. Daphne easily overpowers them both and ties Jasmine up, but Ellen comes to and Jasmine begs her to untie her. She tries, but can’t loosen Daphne’s expert bondage. Jasmine sends Ellen into the kitchen for a knife, and no sooner can you say “Anton Chekhov” than Daphne reappears and is about to de-arm Tony when Jasmine gets free, the two women struggle and mom reaches for the knife and stabs Daphne with it (though for some reason she does not draw blood).

Tony is liberated and can now go through the super-surgery that can restore him to walking and even competing in track – and though Daphne sabotaged both his previous attempts, going so far as to knock off Dr. Peters by disguising herself as a hospital nurse, sneaking up behind him in his office and giving him an injection of potassium chloride (also the main ingredient in the three-drug “cocktails” used in lethal injection executions), thereby making it look like he had a heart attack and croaked just as he was about to do Tony’s surgery, fortunately it turns out he trained a protegé and this person agrees to perform the surgery. It works, and the final sequence is Ellen watching as Jasmine times Tony in a practice 100-yard dash. Dangerous Medicine is an O.K. Lifetime movie, decently directed by old Lifetime hand Jeff Hare from a committee-written script, but it has one big thing going for it: the superb villain performance of Leann Van Mol as Daphne. Tall, skinny, leggy and given to dressing in skin-tight black pants and matching tops, many of which show off her midriff, Daphne is at once an implacable villainess and every teenage straight boy’s dream lust object. She plays the part with a remarkable control of her body and an up-front physicality, and an equally implacable mental state that sends her after whatever she wants regardless of the cost in other human lives that just happen to get in her way.