College Professor Obsession, a.k.a. Deadly Dorm (Reel One Entertainment, Almost Never Films, Grey Wolf Production Services, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. Lifetime ran one of their “premieres,” a movie they’d been heavily hyped called College Professor Obsession – a title which could have denoted a college professor obsessed with having sex with a student, or a student obsessed with having sex with a professor. It turned out to be the former – the synopsis on imdb.com reads, “When a university student refuses to sleep with her professor in exchange for good grades, she's in danger of being killed to keep her quiet, and her mother must drop everything to save her” – but that plot line doesn’t materialize until almost halfway through the movie. The victim of the obsessed college professor is Jennifer “Jenny” Willis (Grace Patterson, well cast in this movie; she navigates the character’s dilemmas with power and authority and she’s good-looking but not so drop-dead gorgeous that you spend the film thinking, “What straight guy wouldn’t want to have sex with her?”), who as the film begins is about to start college and move into a dorm on campus rather than stay with her parents Kristin (Jocelyn Saenz) and Steven (Michael Wagemann). The casting of her parents is the first “off” note in this movie: the actors are so young they’d be more believable as Jenny’s older brother and sister than as mom and dad, and we get a lot of shots of Kristin showing as much tit as you can get away with on basic cable while Jenny’s breasts are always fully covered. Steven tends to fade into the woodwork but Kristin, who makes her living running a boutique called Blush (what Steven does for work, if anything, isn’t mentioned), shepherds her into the campus on her first day and literally leads her to her dorm room on the 12th floor.

The film’s working title was Deadly Dorm – probably a more accurate reflection of what it’s really about – and the movie begins with a flashback that might be from a previous Lifetime movie even though imdb.com doesn’t mark this as being a sequel. In the previous film a student named Elaine (Cassidy Huckabay) took a header off the balcony of the dorm building and fell to her death below during a party, and it’s remained a mystery whether she fell accidentally, committed suicide or was murdered. When Jenny arrives she’s given Elaine’s old room and receives the rather macabre message that she’s going to have to sleep in Elaine’s old bed (I remember thinking, “I hope at least they changed the sheets!”) and she’s also inheriting Elaine’s former roommates, the fashion-obsessed Beth (Johanna Liauw) and the almost totally withdrawn Sarah (Alexandra Harris). We also get to meet the residents’ assistant of the dorm, a graduate student named Kyle (Cody Bagshaw), and Dane (Raymond Roberts), a jock (though frankly he looks too scrawny to be much of an athlete) to whom Jenny is briefly attracted until she decides he has nothing to offer above the neck. Jenny is an athlete herself – she had got admitted to the university on a track scholarship, only she injured herself in high school and has had to work out and bring herself back up to speed (literally) in hopes of making the team and winning back her scholarship offer. Unlike most movies about college, this one actually depicts at least some of the “education” in higher education; we get to see Jenny in class with an American history teacher, Professor Harrington (Brian Shoop), an old, self-important man who begins his class by saying, “Where does American history begin?” When a few students have the temerity to raise their hands to offer answers to his question, he rather testily insists that the question was purely rhetorical and he’s going to be lecturing the whole hour with no interruptions from students.

Jenny seems to be relieved when her next class is on abnormal psychology and is taught by Dr. Davrow (Randy Wayne), who’s young, bearded, attractive and in any other movie about college would be the “understanding,” “with-it” professor who would help Our Heroine and her fellow students navigate the weird world of college. But no-o-o-o-o: as any hardened watcher of Lifetime movies would tell you, he’s the principal villain of the piece, the titular obsessed professor who seems to be determined to have sex with every at least slightly attractive woman on campus. When Professor Harrington dies of a mysterious heart attack in his office – though we’re clearly meant to believe by writers Lee Gorlitz and David Hickey that Professor Davrow poisoned him – his place in the American history class is taken by a woman, Ms. Kingsley (Tiffany Montgomery), who seems more understanding and more interested in helping her students learn than massaging her own ego (in its conceit that college professors are really working out their own ego issues on their students this film reminded me of the marvelous movie Speak, made for Showtime in 2004 and which I saw on Lifetime in 2009; it’s about a student who spends an entire year not talking because she was traumatized by being a rape victim, and she was played by Kristen Stewart in a marvelous performance that led me to seek out the Twilight movies even though, as I joked then, my husband Charles and I were far above the age of their target audience). Professor Davrow gives Jenny a C on a paper she thought deserved a higher grade – Jenny is especially concerned because she has to maintain at least a B average to win back her track scholarship – and after class he tells her off, saying that it’s inappropriate for her to show up for class in casual clothes and hinting that if she dresses more sexily he’ll give her better marks. The movie runs on parallel tracks as Jenny tries to find out the truth behind Elaine’s death and at the same time deals with the increasingly aggressive pursuit from Professor Davrow, who’s always talking about the good old days when men wore suits and women wore dresses to class as a sign of “respect” for their professors and the institution as a whole, and whose real intentions become clear when he invites Jenny to a party at his home, gives her wine, takes her to a private room and suddenly grabs her and forcibly kisses her.

Jenny threatens to report him to the campus authorities, but Davrow points out that he’s a tenured professor with a sterling academic record and she’s just a nobody student, so who’s going to believe her? She seeks out Professor Kingsley in hopes that a woman might be more understanding, but when she approaches Kingsley’s office Jenny sees her necking with Professor Davrow – just what is it about this guy and how does he sustain the sheer amount of sex he’s supposed to be having in this movie? And when Jenny isn’t having her internal debate over whether to yield to Davrow’s advances in exchange for the good grades she needs to get her scholarship back and stay in school, she’s dealing with repeated attempts to break into her and her roommates’ dorm room – which continue even after she asks Kyle to have the locks changed. Writers Goritz and Hickey and director Brent Ryan Green actually do a good job of maintaining the suspense and keeping the tension up. Eventually both Jenny’s roommates, Beth and Sarah, admit to her that they did have sex with Davrow as the price of getting good grades in his class (ironically he’s teaching abnormal psychology and showing every evidence of being abnormal himself), and after Jenny tries to tell off Davrow in class and he responds by ostentatiously, and in full view of everybody, crossing out the B grade he gave her latest paper and marking her down to D instead, she walks out and she and Sarah agree to report him no matter what the consequences. (It seems odd in a movie both made and set in 2021 that it never occurs to either of them to denounce him on social media – especially after watching Framed by My Husband the previous night, in which the sexually abusive villain is brought down largely by social-media posts about him.)

Alas, for some unaccountable reason Jenny and Sarah make their pact while sitting on the edge of a bench overlooking a courtyard – and an assailant dressed in the obligatory black hoodie that’s become standard wear for Lifetime villains so we can’t tell what gender they are pushes them off. Sarah ends up in the hospital in a coma and Jenny is rescued only by the timely arrival of her jock friend Dane (ya remember Dane?), who pulls her to safety. Jenna reports all this to her mom, whose response is to tell her either to transfer to the state college nearer to home or to move off campus and do the hour-long commute to school each day. Meanwhile, Jenny’s investigations into Elaine’s death continue and she’s convinced that Professor Davrow had an accomplice who murdered Elaine to keep her from exposing him, but she doesn’t know who that is. At least she finds out who’s been breaking into their room and why; it’s Kyle, the residents’ assistant, but he’s not the killer. It seems that he and Elaine were dating but keeping it a secret because graduate students working for the school weren’t supposed to fraternize with undergrads, and just before she was killed Elaine had taken candid pictures of Professor Davrow in compromising positions with a student and had threatened to show them to the campus authorities.

Only Elaine had got killed before she could show the photos, and her phone was smashed beyond repair when she fell (in the flashback of her death we heard her assailant say, “Give me the phone!”), but before that Kyle had downloaded the pictures and printed them out, and Elaine had hid the printouts in her room. Jenny and Sarah find the photos – and suddenly [spoiler alert!] Beth is holding a gun on them, announcing that she was Elaine’s killer and she did it to protect Professor Davrow because, rather than letting him exploit her sexually for good grades, she was genuinely in love with him. Jenny and Sarah flee the madwoman with a gun and the Seventh Cavalry arrives in the person of Jenny’s mom Kristin, whom she called for help and who got there in time to save her daughter – when Davrow comes on the scene with his own gun, Kristin grabs Beth’s and shoots him after Beth was rendered unconscious and dropped it – even though she was delayed by a robbery attempt at her boutique which may or may not have been connected with the goings-on at the college. The film ends happily, of course, with Jenny back to her old form on the track and winning her scholarship, staying in the dorm and she and Sarah getting a new roommate, Lisa, who hopefully will remain ignorant of the dark history of that particular room. I’m liking College Professor Obsession better writing about it than I did while watching it – it’s full of improbabilities but at least it’s a workmanlike suspense tale, and like a lot of Lifetime movies it’s blessed by a marvelous performance by Randy Wayne as the principal villain (and by Johanna Liauw equally fine as Beth, who seems to wear a sense of entitlement on her sleeve) as well as some effective suspense sequences by director Green.