Galentine’s Day Nightmare (N.B. Thrilling Films 8, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Alas, the next movie, Galentine’s Day Nightmare, was pretty much a return to Lifetime’s usual form, though it has its moments. Like How I Met Your Murderer, Galentine’s Day Nightmare was both written and directed by women – Roxanne Boisvert and Andrea Canning, respectively (Boisvert is a new name for me but Canning is a familiar writer in the stable of Pierre David and Tom Berry, the producers), but they don’t acquit themselves nearly as well as their counterparts in How I Met Your Murderer. Never heard of “Galentine’s Day” before? Neither had I, though apparently it means the day before Valentine’s Day, when a group of professional women go out on a ladies’-night date together. This particular “Galentine’s Day” happens in Philadelphia and features the staff of the Quickpulse Sportswear company, which has just been acquired by female entrepreneur Margaret Coleman (Karen Cliche, an almost too appropriate a name for a Lifetime actress!).

The protagonist is Claire Donahue (Camille Stopps), and on Galentine’s Day at the Café Bistro 215 she meets and is instantly attracted to a hot Black guy named Brian (Anthony Grant). Since he’s a sexy guy in a Lifetime movie, we instantly know he’s up to no good, and so it turns out: while he’s at Claire’s place he wakes up in the middle of the night, hacks her computer and smartphone to install spyware on them, and takes pictures of her credit cards with his own phone. Exactly what he’s up to isn’t apparent at first, but Claire realizes she’s stepped in it big-time when she shows up for work the next day – and Brian turns up at the Quickpulse Sportswear office and introduces himself as Margaret Coleman’s husband (and also the owner – not just a waiter or bartender – at Café Bistro 215). . Claire and Brian meet up again at a park where they both like to jog (information Claire let slip to him on their big night together) and he seems all lovey-dovey – a park ranger named Dale sees them together and assumes they’re boyfriend and girlfriend – and Brian assures Claire that he and Margaret are divorcing and therefore he will soon be available.

Only Brian, who continually eavesdrops on Claire because he’s bugged her computer and her phone and therefore knows exactly where she’s going to be and with whom, stages a couple of public scenes in which he accuses her of stalking him. Then Brian confronts his wife Margaret in a stairwell at the Quickpulse offices and stabs her to death with a letter opener he stole from the Quickpulse mailroom, so Claire’s fingerprints are on it. The whole point of Brian’s seduction of Claire, we soon realize, is to make it look like Claire became so infatuated with Brian that she offed his wife to eliminate the competition. Brian even goes so far as to plant a tracking device on his own car, one he purchased with a counterfeit credit card made from his photo of Claire’s real one, so it will be traced to her. Though writer Canning has made clear that Brian is the bad guy from scene one, she does throw a surprise twist up her sleeve when she makes Tiffany Adler (Tina Jung), Claire’s best friend at work and someone she’s relying on for help, turn out to be Brian’s secret confederate, a woman he’d known in Atlanta and befriended (and probably more) then – though given that Brian already drove his first wife to suicide (if he didn’t actually kill her himself) and murdered his second wife, both because they were rich women and he wanted their money, Tiffany is rather ill-advised if her ambition is to become the third Mrs. Brian Coleman.

One particularly interesting aspect of Canning’s script is how much of it is motivated by adultery and divorce: one reason Brian selects Ciaire as his victim to frame is that previously she accidentally killed her boyfriend while they were having an argument over, you guessed it, his alleged affair; and Claire’s parents, Hannah (Susan Hamann) and Mark (David Lafountaine), broke up over Mark’s infidelities, and there are a couple of fascinating scenes in Brian talks to a photo of his parents and says the reason he’s targeting women was out of revenge for the way his mom took his dad to the cleaners financially during their bitter divorce. (This is a good movie if you believe that there’s something fundamentally silly about one human being expecting another never to have sex with anyone else for the rest of their lives.) Fortunately both Hannah (imdb.com lists her as “Anna” but I’m sure “Hannah” is what I heard the actors say) and Mark are still around, still in town and properly supportive of their daughter in her Kafka-esque predicament, and Mark, a former software engineer, figures out how to get Brian’s spyware programs off of Claire’s computer and phone.

There’s also a fascinating antagonism between the two women cops assigned to Margaret Coleman’s murder: white cop Kim Sanders (Kate Fenton) falls completely for Brian’s frame and is convinced Claire did it, but her Black partner, Kim Bailey (Lisa Michelle Cornelius, a powerful actress who deserves a TV series of her own), is suspicious. Between Bailey and the Black woman lawyer, Sophie (JaNae Armogan), Claire hires to represent her, the cops finally become convinced that Brian is the killer, and Tiffany rats him out for a lighter sentence and thus gives them the evidence they need to arrest him. Galentine’s Day Nightmare gets better as it progresses and Claire ends up in the Kafka-esque (or Hitchcockian) dilemma faced by many a previous innocent hero or heroine forced to flee the cops and stay at large until they can uncover the real killer – and Anthony Grant makes Brian a multidimensional character instead of just one of Lifetime’s standard drop-dead gorgeous villains. He also deserves a career boost from this film!