Pretty Cheaters, Deadly Lies (a.k.a. Deadly Jealousy: The Killer Cousin) (CME Auburn Productions, MV Pictures, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a marathon of three, count ’em, three movies on Lifetime, a couple of 2020 releases with a “premiere” sandwiched in between. The first one up was actually in some ways the best, even though none of them were the sort of diamonds in the rough that sometimes crop up on Lifetime and make this channel worth watching. It was called Deadly Cheaters, Pretty Lies, though imdb.com lists that only as the working title and calls it Deadly Jealousy: The Killer Cousin. I had assumed the reference to “cheaters” in the title referred to people in marriages or long-term relationships having sex with people other than their husbands, wives or long-term partners. Instead it was about academic cheating. The central characters were two cousins, Madison Willits (Sydney Meyer) and Hanna Fletcher (Keana Graves). Both are being raised by single parents, Madison by her well-to-do father Michael (Sebastian Roberts) and Hanna by her nurse mother Amanda (Kate Drummond, top-billed), the sister of Michael’s late wife. (We’re told Michael is a widower but we’re never clear what happened to Hanna’s father.)

At the start of the movie Michael reaches his breaking point with his spoiled-rotten daughter and, after she totals the red sports car he gave her, he buys her an SUV but tells her that unless she gets into a high-prestige college – either the University of Pennsylvania (his own alma mater) or a top-notch private school, he’s going to cut her off from any of his money and she’ll have to make her own way in the world. The only problem is Madison is a mediocre student who doesn’t have the grades, much less the extracurricular activities or social-service volunteer work high-end colleges look for in their applicants, but she uses her considerable street smarts to look like she does. Her way of doing that is to invite Hanna and Hanna’s sort-of boyfriend Drew (Alexander Eling) over to her place, where she spikes their drinks with Rohypnol. Drew leaves and, driving under the influence without knowing he’s doing so, crashes his car into a tree and ends up in a coma for the next two-thirds of the movie. Hanna is set up by Madison, who strips her, writes a big “S” with lipstick on her chest (for “slut”) and takes a whole raft of embarrassing photos, which she keeps on her smartphone and also backs up to her laptop.

Then she uses these to blackmail Hanna into taking her college entrance exam for her – which means she has to avoid detection by Counselor Parker (Aaron Ashmore) – we never learn this character’s first name – who’s suspicious of her and, since he’s scheduled to proctor the test, would recognize Hanna as a different person from Madison when she showed up to take Madison’s test for her. So Madison drives her new SUV to Parker’s home and throws a rock through his window, and when he receives the call that his house has been vandalized he leaves the test hall and so he’s out of the way when Hanna takes Madison’s test for her. Then Madison keeps on blackmailing Hanna, forcing her to write her college application essays and do all her homework for her – wearing out Hanna since she still has to do her own homework too – and also blocking Hanna’s contacts, including her mother, her Black best friend and the coach of her cheerleading squad (did I tell you Hanna was on the cheerleading squad? She’s a Lifetime high-school heroine, isn’t she?), so she doesn’t get texts or calls from any of these people and she ends up fired from the cheerleading squad because they moved up the scheduled practice time a half-hour and no one told her. (One wonders why the supposedly smart Hanna never figures out that someone monkeyed with her phone; she doesn’t realize that until the man her mother is dating, who works in computer security, checks out her phone and unblocks the numbers.)

Madison even transfers from the private high school her dad had put her in to Elmwood, the public school Hanna attends. She tells her dad it’s because she’ll have an easier time keeping her grade point average up at a public school, but of course the real reason she wants to be at Elmwood is to harass Hanna and get more work out of her. Thanks to Hanna’s covering for her, both she and Madison end up on Elmwood’s “Stellar Students” list, and their photos are published in the school paper – whereupon Counselor Parker sees the two photos, notices the family resemblance between the two girls (kudos to this film’s casting director for finding two young women who look enough alike they’re believable as cousins, even though Charles faulted the film because the actors playing high-school students were visibly in their 20’s) and realizes that Hanna has been doing Madison’s work for her. The ending is pretty predictable: Madison confronts Counselor Parker outside his home and, when he threatens to expose her, runs him down with her SUV. Only she doesn’t notice that her license plate is askew after she does that and there’s his blood all over it. Madison’s dad does notice this and turns her in, and there’s a big final confrontation scene between Madison and Hanna, which ends with Madison being arrested (and dad visiting her in jail and holding her hand in the visiting room in an almost sexual way) and Hanna receiving not only her college admission but the full-ride scholarship she’d been competing for and which she would have lost if her compromising photos had come to light.

Deadly Cheaters, Pretty Lies is a pretty ordinary Lifetime movie, but it’s made special by the marvelous performance of Sydney Meyer as Madison. Instead of the cute, perky psycho a lot of Lifetime movies – especially ones set in high school – have given us, Meyer gives us a portrait of chilling evil. She stalks the high-school corridors in five-inch stiletto heels – the shoes, though outrageously impractical given how much walking you have to do around a high school, practically become a character in their own right – and sports a grim determination, sort of like Humphrey Bogart in his late-1930’s gangster roles, a breezy unconcern for anyone else and a deep desire to “get hers” no matter how many people she has to ruin, exploit, hurt or kill to do it. There are also felicitous touches in the script by Jennifer Edwards and Anna Katherine Teylor, notably the neat gimmick of having the mostly comatose Drew (ya remember Drew?) suddenly have a violent reaction when Hanna’s nurse mother, who just happens to be taking care of him in the hospital, mentions Madison’s name. There’s nothing special in Leo Scherman’s direction, but he gets the job done even though one of Lifetime’s women director protégées might have got more out of a story that’s ultimately about female rivalry.