Murder on Maple Drive (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a film called Murder on Maple Drive, a title for which imdb.com revealed no hits at all – either under that name or the film’s working title, Killer Deal. The only people associated with the film whose names I could find online were the two actors playing the lead couple, Mark and Tess Allison (Sebastien Roberts and Bea Santos). Sebastien Roberts is a hot Black hunk to drool for – and once again, as in the previous night’s “premiere” Next-Door Nightmare, Lifetime gives us an interracial couple (this one even more obviously interracial than that of Next-Door Nightmare because Sebastien Roberts is darker and much more visibly Black than the more racially ambiguous Mark Taylor) without making any big to-do about it. When Murder on Maple Drive opens the Allisons have just closed on the titular murder house on Maple Drive, whose previous occupants, Andrew and Sophie Clark, had been found in the house’s basement a year before, both shot to death with a shotgun. The local police ruled it a murder-suicide – they claimed Andrew shot Sophie and then himself – but we know a third person was involved. For one thing, we’ve seen a prologue of a third person dragging a body out of the garage to plant it in the basement. For another, a shotgun seems like an awkward weapon to stage a murder-suicide; though people have been known to kill themselves with shotguns (does the name “Ernest Hemingway” mean anything to you?), it’s a strange choice to kill either yourself or someone else at close quarters and someone contemplating killing their spouse and then themselves would be more likely to get a pistol.

Which brings up the third reason to be suspicious: as Tess Allison starts her own investigation of the mysterious deaths in her house – and as more people with information about the crime start being attacked themselves – she hears from various townspeople that Andrew Clark never actually owned a gun; he’s suspected of stealing the weapon but he also had a reputation of being scared by guns. (I can relate: I’ve never owned a gun, I’ve never even touched or handled a real gun, and the only places I’ve seen actual – as opposed to toy – firearms are in police officers’ holsters and on display for sale at Big “5” Sporting Goods stores. So it’s hard for me to understand the gun culture and the people I’ve known, most of whom grew up in the Midwest, who can remember their fathers taking them out behind the barn with a gun to teach them how to shoot, including how to handle a gun safely.) Anyway, like the male lead of Next-Door Nightmare, Mark Allison is frantically traveling across the country visiting various cities to nail down a lucrative business deal that will enable them actually to afford the house they have optimistically bought – and that only at a discount because the realtor who sold it to them (who’s also a personal friend of Tess’s) did her legal duty and warned them that two people had been killed there. (Hence the film’s original title, Killer Deal.) Of course what the realtor didn’t tell Tess was that people are still being killed, or at least assaulted, to keep them quiet about the house’s secrets.

One of them is Harmony Heyer, a reporter for the town’s local newspaper, who wrote a series of articles about the Clark killings and became convinced that it was not a murder-suicide; it was a double murder, and though she hasn’t been able to prove it she is pretty confident she knows who did it. During her researches Tess gets to meet two presumably supportive neighbors, both named David, only one of them, David Gleason, is so nice and too-good-to-be-true that we hardened Lifetime watchers are convinced he will turn out to be the villain – and indeed he does, though his motives are a bit unusual for a Lifetime bad guy. It seems he was perfectly normal until his wife died of natural causes two years earlier, whereupon he began hitting on other women who vaguely resembled her. He was fired from his job – though he was allowed to announce it as a “resignation” and given a generous severance package – after three women in the workplace accused him of sexual harassment. He also reportedly had an affair with Sophie Clark until she realized he only wanted her because he saw her as a living incarnation of his dead wife – and of course the film ends with him assaulting Tess until he’s shot down. There were some potential class conflicts in the script – particularly when reporter Heather informs Tess that she was fired from the newspaper for continuing to write about the Clark case because David Gleason was wealthy and politically connected in the town and had enough influence to get her publisher to fire her and quash further stories about the case – but not much is made of that.

The director is Michelle Ouellet, who had also done the Lifetime movie Evil Stepmom my husband Charles and I had watched the night before, but at least in Evil Stepmom she had a script which, within the conventions of Lifetime storytelling, made some sense. Here she was forced to work with a story that made virtually no sense, though she responded with an unusual number of overhead shots and some quite convincing Gothic suspense scenes – notably one in which the heroine has locked herself in the basement to hide from the villain. She intended to call the police but she left her phone behind in the kitchen, and she’s locked the door behind her but it’s a flimsily constructed wooden door and he’s got a crowbar, with which he attacks it and opens hole after hole until he’s been able to make a big enough opening so he can reach in and unlock it. Ouellet has a real flair for this sort of suspense and it’s a pity that here it wasn’t harnessed in service to a better script; once we meet David Gleason, all superficial niceness and charm, we know he’s going to turn out to be the villain and we only wonder why it’s taking the characters so long to see through him – and there isn’t a character like Gabrielle in Evil Stepmom who sees through him immediately and tries in vain to warn everybody else. It also doesn’t help that, though Sebastien Roberts’ character is supposed to be the male lead, he’s on screen so little and when he finally does reappear the villain knocks him out almost immediately, so he’s no help to the imperiled heroine. (Instead it’s the nice neighbor David who saves her from the nasty neighbor David.) I’d like to see this movie again under better circumstances (I had a dinner guest over and he was distracting me, especially since we were still cooking through most of the film) … no, I really wouldn’t. It would be nice to be a bit clearer about what’s going on but I’m not eager to invest another two hours of my life in this sorry film. Please, Lifetime, give Michelle Ouellet some better scripts; she’s too good a director to be wasted on this sort of garbage!