Memories of a Murder (Studiofest Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a movie called Memories of a Murder – not to be confused with two movies that show up on imdb.com when you search for that title called Memories of Murder without the indefinite article, a 1990 TV-movie starring Nancy Allen and a 2003 Asian production that at least some people online regard as a classic, made in South Korea by director Bong Joon Ho, which was apparently inspired by a real-life killing that was unsolved when the film was made but was solved later. The 2021 Memories of a Murder is so underdocumented that imdb.com lists four cast members but doesn’t identify them with their roles. Neither do they list a director or writer, but judging from my hastily scrawled chicken scratches as I tried to take down the names from the credits, the director is Ann Milami and the writer is Matthew Sorvillo. The two seemed to be tweaking the usual Lifetime formulae in the direction of Gothic horror: they begin the movie with a rather nerdy young man named Ryan – with a tousled head of hair that makes it look like he’s auditioning for a biopic of the young Bob Dylan – walking into a bar run by two heavy-duty biker types and asking if this is the place where a particularly notorious murder happened. They’re excessively reluctant to talk about it, but eventually – after signaling that he’s unwelcome there when one of them pours the beer they’ve just sold him into a glass and drinks it himself – they say yes just before they throw him out.

He goes off into the darkness and then gets himself murdered while he’s wearing a jacket that previously belonged to a serial killer and for which he paid $1,500 to a shop called Morbid Curiosities in Frankfort. It’s not clear which state this particular Frankfort is in – answers.com (https://www.answers.com/Q/Is_there_a_city_named_Frankfurt_in_US) lists several cities named Frankfort in the U.S., in states including Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and South Dakota. While I was watching the movie I assumed based on the “:country” ambience that it was the one in Kentucky, but later on in the movie writer Sorvillo drops a hint that it’s really the one in Michigan. Morbid Curiosities turns out to be a shop run by a recent high-school graduate named Gail Niven (Isabella Pisacane), though it’s actually owned by a fiercely possessive wheelchair-bound grandmother, Margo Dibbin (Jamie Donnelly, who in her younger years had played young women in the original stage productions of Grease and The Rocky Horror Show). Gail has won an acceptance letter from a university – it’s not clear which one or where, but it would involve her leaving town and, when the university calls to confirm that she got the acceptance letter, grandma takes the call and literally laughs at Gail’s pretension that Margo would ever allow her to leave home. Gail’s only friend in town is Alexa (Abby Awe), who isn’t an official partner or employee of Morbid Curiosities but hangs out on the store a lot and in an excessive amount of altruism even agrees to staff the counter when Gail has business outside.

Morbid Curiosities’ business is selling murder memorabilia – which is a real and surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) thriving business, though most of the people who deal in “murderabilia” in real life do so online. The reason for that becomes clear as the townspeople of Frankfort – particularly the city’s richest and most influential family, the Kellys, – approach Gail and demand that she close the shop and leave town because it’s giving the community a bad name. The representative of the Kellys that makes herself particularly obnoxious is the family’s spoiled-princess daughter Tori – though her cousin Rory (a guy) not only doesn’t go along with Tori’s jihad against Morbid Curiosities but befriends Gail and even tries to cruise her. While all this is going on a police detective named Jamie Roesland (Rosa Gilmore) shows up; she’s based in the neighboring town of Traverse City (which definitively establishes the locale as Michigan) and she’s in Frankfort to investigate the murder of Ryan, the little guy from the prologue who showed up in the wrong bar at the wrong time and got himself killed wearing the jacket of a famous serial killer. Other people start turning up dead in Frankfort itself and soon Gail finds herself the prime suspect.

Just after Ryan’s killing she had got a mysterious box, not traceably shipped through the post office or any private company but merely left there, and shortly afterwards she got a call demanding that she put the items within the box – a blood-stained knife block and other trophies from a recent murder, including a pair of glasses and an animal knickknack – that only later are reported as souvenirs of a recent murder in the area. Gail protests to the unseen voice that she can’t possibly offer these items for sale without any authentication, but the voice continues to harass her as the body count goes up. Detective Roesland works the new cases even though they’re happening in Frankfort, outside her jurisdiction – a clue I should have made more of than I did – and soon it turns out that Gail’s real last name is not Niven but Stubbs, and she’s the daughter of G. W. Stubbs, known as the “Michigan Taxidermy Killer” because after he offed his victims he literally cut their skin off and stuffed them. Stubbs just happens to be incarcerated for these crimes in a prison within easy driving distance of Frankfort, and Gail goes to see him. Their first meeting ends inconclusively but at the second one both of them realize they are father and daughter, and the plot devolves from there.

Meanwhile Gail’s grandmother Margo industriously works to make herself a red herring, having Gail fetch her mice from the local pet store so she can feed them to her pet snake – in one of the film’s most haunting scenes Margo narrates a twisted rewrite of the Book of Genesis to her granddaughter, saying that Adam wanted to keep Eve barefoot, pregnant and ignorant and it was the serpent who spared her that fate and thus should be regarded as the benefactor of all womanhood – and in the middle of one big confrontation scene between her and Gail, Margo dramatically gets up from her wheelchair and reveals that she can really walk. Writer Sorvillo obviously intended this as a real shocker, but it won’t be any surprise to anyone who’s seen as many 1930’s movies as I have, since in films of that period characters who were seen in wheelchairs almost never really needed them but were merely posing as cripples for some nefarious purpose. (This only changed in 1938, when Lionel Barrymore’s long struggle with arthritis deprived him of the ability to walk and forced him to use a wheelchair for real, whereupon the management at MGM had to find him parts he could play from a chair.)

Detective Roesland confronts Gail and insists that all the killings she’s investigating center around her store, and since grandma is wheelchair-bound Gail is the only possible suspect. Both she and writer Sorvillo are ignoring Alexa, who hangs around the shop so much and does so much unpaid work for them I was assuming she would turn out to be the real killer – but in the end it turns out to be [spoiler alert!] the police detective herself, whose mother was a victim of the Micigan Taxidermy Killer (Gail’s dad, remember) and who determined to get rid of the “bad seed” of Gail’s bloodline by framing her for the murders and then killing her, ostensibly in the line of duty. Only Gail, in an example of the Chekhovian dictum that if you establish a pistol in act one it must go off in act three, turns out to have inherited her father’s double-jointedness (which he demonstrated to both her and us in one of her prison visits) and uses it to escape the detective’s handcuffs. Gail overpowers the bad policewoman and nearly strangles her to death – director Milami (assuming I got her name right) makes the mistake of cutting away in mid-strangulation and thereby not letting us know whether the detective survives Gail’s assault (I would have wanted her to give Isabella Pisacane the chance to act the conflicting emotions, at first determined to kill Jamie and then relenting and letting her live because if she killed her she’d be no better than her dad) until a final tag scene, in which Gail drives by the local prison and sees Jamie in the exercise yard.

Memories of a Murder is a pretty silly film plot-wise and all Milami’s attempts at Gothic atmospherics don’t really help that much – though the straightforward approach most Lifetime hacks would have taken would have been even worse. This is also a typical modern entertainment in that there isn’t anyone in it we really like: Gail’s overall twitchiness makes it impossible for us to warm up to her as the innocent victim of a frame, her grandmother is virtually a figure from hell, taking possessiveness to ridiculous levels – she seems to come off as a combination of Norman Bates’ mother in the backstory to Psycho and Agnes Moorehead’s mother-ln-law literally from hell in Bewitched – and we can’t stand that busybody cop well before she’s revealed as the villain. Memories of a Murder is the sort of movie that’s wretched by any normal standard of quality, but it’s also oddly haunting and one can admire the talent behind it both in front of and behind the cameras even though one wishes all that talent could have been put to better use.