Evil Stepmom (Tuna Waffle Productions, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

In fact, Next Door Nightmare was so good the movie Lifetime showed immediately afterwards, Evil Stepmom, seemed weaker than it really was by comparison. Part of the problem is that Lifetime stuck a title on it that gave the whole plot away – instead of starting with a bang the way Stephen Romano did in Next Door Nightmare, Evil Stepmom writer Huelah Lander (I presume that’s a woman, though there’s neither a bio nor a photo on their imdb.com page) dances around her plot premise for almost an hour of running time and wants us to be asking, “Is she or isn’t she?,” about her villain characters, Caroline Hargrave (Tara Spencer-Naim) and her daughter Bethany (Emily Clarke). Even if Lander intended their villainy to be a surprise to the audience, whoever stuck this movie with the title Evil Stepmom rather gave it away. The story is set in Oregon and deals with Tim Lasky (Randy Thomas, who bears a really odd resemblance to the 1950’s psychic Criswell, friend of Mae West and Ed Wood; he’s not bad-looking but he’s not exactly passion’s plaything either!), a widower who’s raising two daughters Annabelle (Hannah Vandenbygaart) and Gabrielle (Julia Lalonde). There were a few bits of dialogue trying to establish that the two girls were actually twins, but they look barely enough alike to be believable as sisters and totally unbelievable as twins – Annabelle has straight blonde hair and Gabrielle has curly dark hair, and Gabrielle is nearly a head shorter.

Annabelle has decided that after the death of their mother a few years earlier from an aneurysm while on a mountain hike, it’s time for their dad to start dating again, so without his knowledge she signs him up for an online dating service. Caroline and Bethany are a couple of con artists experienced at throwing themselves at rich men (we’re never told what Tim does for a living, but judging from the richly appointed house they live in it’s obvious that it’s lucrative; he may not be super-rich but he’s certainly well-to-do), draining them dry and then moving on, but Caroline’s online dating profile identifies her as a doctor and that’s sort-of accurate: she was a doctor in Colorado until she was caught selling opiate prescriptions and was busted; it doesn’t appear that she served any time but she did lose her medical license. That doesn’t stop her from pretending to be a doctor and to have a job at the local hospital in the small Oregon community where this takes place. Caroline arranges to meet Tim at the soccer practice of the all-girls team he coaches, the Toffees (I wondered if the team changed its name from something now considered politically incorrect, like the Squaws – I was thinking of the recent change in the name of the Cleveland major league baseball team from the Indians to the Guardians – though Major League Baseball’s Web site, https://www.mlb.com/indians/scores, still has the old name – does this mean that we’re going to get a whole bunch of superhero names and the Washington, D.C. football team, which dumped the “Redskins” moniker without picking a new one, will end up the Washington Avengers?),where she brings along her daughter Bethany, who tries out for the Toffees and instantly makes it onto the team when she shoots a goal directly into the net. (The Toffees and the teams they play against have probably the worst goalies in the world; if it were as easy to score goals in real-life soccer as it is in this movie, soccer would probably have become much more popular in the U.S.)

We get a quick scene between Caroline and Bethany in their car which establishes that whatever Caroline’s plot is, Bethany is totally in on it and not an innocent victim who doesn’t know what her mom is doing – though in that story it’s a mother and son rather than a mother and daughter, it reminded me of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters and the movie made from it – while we get a clue about Caroline’s agenda from a rather seedy-looking man who approaches her on foot and blames her for impoverishing him and ruining his life. It reminded me of the early scene in the 1915 film A Fool There Was in which the vamp villainess, played by Theda Bara in her first film (and one of only two that survive), is approached by a barely alive homeless person who points out “what you have made of me – and still you prosper, you hellcat.” Though he doesn’t exactly fall head over heels for Caroline, Tim is taken enough with her that when Caroline tells him there’s been a fire in her home and she and Bethany will need a place to stay while the place is rebuilt, he invites her and Bethany to stay with him for the duration. Gabrielle is the one person in the movie who’s immediately on to Caroline – like the Thelma Ritter character in All About Eve – and she tries her best to expose her, including sneaking out of school to pay a visit to the home where Caroline supposedly lives. She encounters a heavy-set Black woman who says it’s her home and, when Gabrielle shows her a photo of Caroline on her cell phone, the Black woman says she’s never seen her before and the complex is so small that if Caroline lived there, she would know her.

Gabrielle also notices Caroline trying to steal her late mother’s silverware and a pearl necklace, but Caroline spies her and is savvy enough to put the necklace back – though one pearl falls from it, Gabrielle picks it up but Bethany is able to recover it so Gabrielle has no evidence that her dad is dating a thief. About three-quarters of the way through the movie Gabrielle finally decides to look up Caroline Hargrave on the Oregon state medical board’s Web site to find out if she really is a doctor. She doesn’t get any hits, so she concludes she’s totally faking it – but later she realizes from the supposedly “fake” ID Bethany showed at a liquor store as Beth Ann Thompson from Colorado, she should be searching the Colorado medical board’s site, and she discovers that there used to be a doctor in that state named Caroline Thompson until she lost her license for dealing drugs. But Gabrielle is getting herself into so much trouble ditching school, playing below her best in the Toffees’ games, and acting hostile towards her soon-to-be stepmother, her dad retaliates against her and lays down the law that she’s to treat Caroline and Bethany with respect and welcome them into the family … or else. (Along the way Caroline has also claimed to be pregnant, presumably with Tim’s child, but we don’t believe her, not only because she’s such a total liar but because, though they’ve been sleeping in the same bed, they’ve been fully clothed and haven’t touched at all.) He’s not specific about the “or else” but Caroline is; out of earshot of Tim she threatens to have Gabrielle committed to a mental institution on the ground that being beaned by a ball during a soccer game has given her concussions that have altered her mental state and made her paranoid. (The quiet but sinister way Tara Spencer-Clarke delivers this threat is the best part of a performance that is overall quite good.)

The climax occurs at the Toffees’ big game, where Gabrielle is supposed to be scouted by a college recruiter who has a soccer scholarship to offer which will help Gabrielle go to school out of town; when I saw a heavy-set Black woman step out of a car and be introduced as the recruiter I briefly thought writer Lander was going to have the recruiter be the same person as the Black woman Gabrielle had run into trying to trace Caroline’s home. Instead Caroline goes totally haywire and kidnaps both Gabrielle and Annabelle from the big game, driving them out to heaven knows where (probably a pre-planned hideout which, like most LIfetime villains in the age of cell phones, she’s picked as a location because there’s no cell service there). Fortunately dad calls them and one of the sisters turns on the phone so Tim gets to hear the crazy stuff Caroline and Bethany – who, it turns out, isn’t Caroline’s daughter at all, but her younger sister; the supposedly “fake” ID with which she bought liquor for the college boys’ party she took the Lasky sisters to was real and she is 23 – is telling his kids. He’s able to hunt them down and rescue them; Caroline has a gun but she keeps getting knocked down from behind by one or the other of the Lasky sisters, and eventually the police arrive and take Caroline and Bethany into custody. The film ends with dad and his two girls back together, and Gabrielle getting a letter that she got the college scholarship after all – they gave it to her after watching films of her previous games. Evil Stepmom isn’t as exciting as Next Door Nightmare – at least partly because its script forced Tara Spencer-Naim and Emily Clarke to play quiet, controlled villainy instead of the high-powered acting Deborah Grover got to do as the neighbor from hell – and after the good clean dirty fun of the previous movie it seemed a bit too understated overall and not as well structured as a script, but it still delivered the Lifetime goods even though, let’s face it, I could have used a hotter actor as the dad!