Young, Stalked and Pregnant (Blue Sky Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

After Secrets on Sorority Row Lifetime showed another movie that was not much better, though it had the potential to be considerably better than it was. It was called Young, Stalked and Pregnant – which made it sound like the writers, Linda J. Cowgill and Clea DeCrane, had brainstormed to come up with the ultimate Lifetime movie title that would encompass as many of the network’s tropes as possible. The story they came up with concerned a young woman, Audrey Collier (Taylor Blackburn), daughter of Mike Collier (Bart Johnson) and Jennifer Adams Collier (Lindsay Hartley, whose presence is so familiar in Lifetime movies Charles wondered whether we’d seen this one before). But it begins with a grim scene in which a hard-edged middle-aged blonde woman is working as an in-home caregiver (making watching this movie a busman’s holiday for me!) for an old professor in a wheelchair. He’s paying her off and firing her because his daughter is coming to move in and care for him instead. She makes a snippy comment – “She’ll check your bedpan once, go ‘Yuck’ and leave” – and when he insists that he’s letting her go anyway she kicks his wheelchair away from his bed, rifles through his wallet and steals all the cash that was supposed to last him the rest of the month.

Then we cut to the Colliers and the main intrigue of the story, which is that young Audrey has just received her acceptance letter from Whittendale University (which judging from the previous films we’ve seen set in the “Whittendale Universe” of Ken Sanders, J. Bryan Dick and Barbara Kymlicka isn’t a good fit for her because virtually all the other Whittendale stories have been about nubile young women turning tricks or becoming mistresses to Whittendale alumni either to get into the school in the first place or, once admitted, to afford its tuition – and Taylor Blackburn, though not downright ugly, doesn’t seem hot enough to excite the attention of well-heeled men seeking animate adolescents as sex toys). She’s also attracted the attention of Sam Doss (Cody Sulek), a fellow student who’s started an affair with her and had sex several times. They’ve made a point to use “protection” – which seems to mean condoms – only one time the condom must have broken inside her because she ends up pregnant by Sam. Sam has been raised by his diabetic grandmother, at least until mom enters the scene; she is Casey Doss (a nice hard-edged villain performance by Tanya Clarke), the woman we saw torment and rip off that nice old guy in the wheelchair in the prologue. She offs Sam’s grandmother with an overdose of insulin, which she’s able to pass off as accidental, and she takes over as Sam’s guardian. The moment she learns that Sam has knocked up a girl whose mother is an Adams – “They own half this city,” she explains – she’s determined to get custody of the child and use it to get her hands on some of the Adams fortune.

Sam, the most potentially conflicted and interesting character in the story, is torn between his own romantic fantasies of marrying Audrey and raising the child themselves, and at least some knowledge of just how impractical that is. Audrey ultimately decides to have the baby but give it up for adoption, so she can attend Whittendale just one semester later than originally scheduled. (Since this movie was made before Secrets on Sorority Row, no one could invoke that film as a warning to Audrey of the dangers of giving up a child for adoption: you might turn them into the psychopathic villain of the next Lifetime movie.) Casey and Sam go through various tactics to get Audrey to marry him and put her child-to-be effectively under Casey’s control, including running down Audrey’s dad Mike with Casey’s car – he recovers but spends much of the middle third of the film in the hospital – and Sam stalking Audrey and even using a lockpick to break into her house and sneak into her bedroom. (Charles wondered how a criminally naïve 18-year-old figured out how to pick a lock, but I gathered his mom probably taught him in hopes of making him her long-term partner in crime à la Jim Thompson’s The Grifters.) It has a typical Lifetime ending in which Casey kidnaps Audrey and her mom Jennifer at gunpoint with the idea of forcing Sam and Audrey to marry, following which she presumably will knock off all three of them so she, as the baby’s legal guardian, will be able to grab her share of the Adams fortune.

She also reveals her motive: she went to high school with Jennifer and was hugely jealous because the better-looking, more intelligent and (above all) richer Adams girl got all the attention and Casey was frozen out. (So many Lifetime plots revolve around high school or early college and the traumas people go through there that, at least in these plots, scar them for life. My own recollection is I was relentlessly teased and bullied in junior high school – or, as it’s rather clinically called now, “middle school” – but had a pretty good time in high school; I went there at the height of the hippie era in the late 1960’s and there were enough oddball students like me I was able to find friends.) There’s a struggle between Jennifer and Casey in which They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for making him at least the 10th richest man in the world), and the police finally arrive and take Casey into custody, then find out that she’s wanted throughout the state for a series of armed robberies. Charles complained that Casey seems to have got away with the murder of her mother, but I suggested that with her history of both violent crime and elder abuse, they’d probably re-look at the older woman’s death and ultimately charge her for it. Once again the film seemed a good deal duller than the central premise promised, and though the writers had the potential to make Sam Doss a genuinely conflicted and multidimensional character – torn between his own romantic fantasies of a life together with his child’s mom, her refusal to go along with them and his mother’s dastardly agenda – but the writers weren’t skilled enough to make the most of him, and neither was the actor playing him, Cody Sulek, who wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous but was easy enough on the eyes one could understand Audrey’s attraction to him. At least the film ended the way I was hoping it would: Mile and Jennifer Collier decide to take on the burden of raising their grandson (we eventually learn Audrey’s baby is a boy) and Sam, who’s been absolved of legal culpability in any of his mom’s schemes, can still play a role in his son’s life as he grows up and Audrey pursues her Whittendale education and whatever career it’s supposed to prepare her for.