Next Door Nightmare (Reel One Entertainment, NB Thrilling Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

I watched last night’s Lifetime movies with my husband Charles, a “premiere” called Next Door Nightmare and another 2021 production called Evil Stepmom. Next Door Nightmare was actually quite good: it was pretty much along the lines of similarly plotted Lifetime movies about middle-aged women who become convinced the younger, healthier and recently married lead is actually their daughter, but this was better done than usual. I suspect one reason is that the writer, Stephen Romano, established the plot quickly and economically and didn’t keep us dancing around half the running time before making clear who was doing what to whom, who the villain was and what dangers the good guys were in. The film opens with a prologue in which Helen Henderson (Deborah Grover, in a full-throated psycho performance that’s blessedly and deliciously unsubtle – don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to see subtle depictions of evil, but it’s also nice to see an actor playing a psycho bare their teeth and unashamedly chew the scenery) hounding her latest victim, a young woman named Kelly Jones who’s about to give birth to a baby girl. Helen is convinced that Kelly is her daughter and the girl she’s carrying in her womb is Helen’s granddaughter. This is right after Kelly’s husband has died in mysterious circumstances – the police aren’t definitively able to establish that foul play was involved but when they come to interrogate Helen she stabs one of the officers with a knife and gets incarcerated in a mental hospital for nine months.

Meanwhile, Kelly has been killed in a car crash because she was driving to get away from Helen’s home – only in the middle of her drive she got a call back from a doctor affiliated with the Philadelphia Department of Mental Health (we’re in the City of Brotherly Love and it must be winter, or maybe early spring, since there’s an awful lot of snow on the ground). She tried to take the call while driving, lost control of her car and ended up in a fatal collision with a tree. Nine months later Helen is back in the same house, only she’s got a new set of neighbors, another young couple in which the wife is expecting a baby – though she doesn’t learn that until about half an hour into the running time. The couple are Sarah Collins (Julia Borsellino, top-billed) and her racially ambiguous husband Kyle (Mark Taylor) – when we first meet him he seems vaguely Black (light-skinned but nappy-haired and with a broad, sort-of African nose) but his real racial identity isn’t nailed down until his mother Judith (Marium Carvell) comes on the scene and is very visibly Black. (Presumably Kyle’s dad was white.) The Collinses are caught between two incredibly pushy women, Helen and Judith, both of whom insist on helping them unpack – only Judith is just an overly aggressive but sympathetic mother-in-law while Helen has fixated on Sarah as her next candidate to take the place of her own daughter, who years earlier committed suicide because she couldn’t take her mom’s craziness and domineering nature any longer.

Since then Helen has insisted she had two daughters – she didn’t – and has tried to latch on to several young women in troubled marriages who were about to have kids and recast them as her (nonexistent) “other” daughter. It’s also established that Helen is independently wealthy due to the fortune left her by her late husband (though given from what we see of her, we start wondering whether she knocked him off, too), and early on in the movie she receives word from the mortgage holder of a country estate she bought on the outskirts of Philadelphia (conveniently located just outside the range of cell phone service – since the advent of cell phones a lot of Lifetime writers have located the climaxes of their stories in out-of-the-way locations that don’t have cell phone service so the victims can’t call for help) to which she eventually intends to move Sarah and her daughter-to-be so she’ll have a three-generation all-female family and won’t have any of those pesky males around. (It actually reminded me of Margaret Dumont raising her daughter, Helen Miller, on a mountaintop in the 1941 W. C. Fields film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.) In addition to Helen, there’s at least one other crazy person in the film: Kyle’s ex, Angela Robinson (Cait Alexander), whom he broke up with because she was running through his money due to her compulsive gambling. Kyle is setting up some big firm and, while we’re not sure exactly what it does, he’s in line for a lucrative contract but he has to go first to New York and then to London to nail it down – which means Sarah has a lot of time to herself.

On one dinner date with the people Kyle is going to be working for as a contractor, Kyle is entrapped in the restroom by Angela, who sexually assaults him while a friend of hers photographs it and makes it look like Kyle was a willing respondent to her attentions. Then she has the pictures delivered to Sarah, who looks at them, immediately jumps to the worst possible conclusion and leaves him a voicemail message announcing her intention to dump him and raise their kid as a single parent. It turns out that the reason Angela did this was she was bribed by Helen, who offered her cash to set Kyle up for the compromising pictures – which Sarah found all too believable because Kyle had also had a brief affair (presumably with yet a third woman) and they had barely kept their marriage together after that blow. Angela makes an attempt to get twice as much money out of Helen as she was promised, but Helen holds a knife on her and forces her to accept what they previously agreed to and no more. We’re already fearful for Angela because we’ve seen Helen knife two people in the movie already: first a social worker named Grace Henry (Deanna Jarvis) who came to see her on behalf of the Philadelphia Department of Mental Health, which is supposed to keep track of her post-release. Grace stumbled on Helen’s typical shrine room, decorated on its wall with a drawing of a big house in which she’s plugged in, on the cut-outs supposed to represent windows, all the previous victims, young women she’s fastened on and tried to “adopt” to replace her supposedly missing (but really never existent) second daughter. Helen realizes that Grace is about to report her to her supervisor as a patient who, though she did a good enough job feigning recovery to get released, is still obsessed about other people’s families and thereby still a danger to herself or others. So Helen sneaks up from behind, grabs her and stabs her to death. Then Helen buries Grace’s body in her garden under a thin blanket of snow and parks her car (a reddish-brown Jeep SUV) in a garage specifically marked, “No Surveillance.”

Helen also eliminates Kyle’s mother Judith when Judith spots a business card from the Philadelphia Department of Mental Health with Helen’s name written by hand on the back – it was left there by Grace’s co-worker, David Mellard (Ash Catherwood), who’s been looking for her since she stopped showing up for work – and does an online search for Helen. (Nobody else in the movie seems to think of doing that!) Of course Helen catches her and stabs her to death, making her The Heroine’s Black Friend Who Uncovered the Villain’s Plot but Got Killed Before She Could Tell Anybody. Having successfully turned Sarah against her husband, Helen’s only remaining worry is Sarah’s best friend Jennifer Wiles (Michelle Chiu); the two of them grew up together in a group home and were never adopted (hence Sarah’s vulnerability to Helen’s twisted affections, since Sarah never had a mother in any but the most basic biological sense and now she does, sort of) but have remained BFF’s well into adulthood. Jennifer endorses Sarah’s decision to break up with Kyle after she sees the photos, but she’s also the one person in Sarah’s life who seems to see through Helen’s smarmy act. Kyle cuts his business trip to London short to save his marriage from the frame-up Helen engineered with Angela (whom, somewhat surprisingly, Helen actually allowed to live!), only it’s too late: by the time he arrives Helen has already spirited Sarah to her new home in the country.

Helen slips Sarah a drugged drink of water and when she comes to she’s Helen’s prisoner in the big house, with all its doors and windows locked and barred, while Helen is insisting that the three of them (including Sarah’s as-yet unborn daughter) are going to live there forever as one big happy family and, whether she likes it or not just then, sooner or later Sarah will get used to it and enjoy it. Jennifer tries to find out just where Helen’s country home is, but she can’t trace it until she goes to Helen’s city house and goes through her trash can – where she finds that crumpled-up notice from the bank telling Helen that her mortgage has been paid in full, and helpfully including the property’s address. She relays that information to Kyle, who’s driving around the lakeshore area looking for the place, and apparently he’s able to get the local police on the line because, before Helen can shoot either him or Sarah with the gun she conveniently has on premises (something of a surprise because she’s committed all her previous murders with knives, but I guess she wanted a tool with which she could kill at longer range), they arrive and eventually take her back into custody. This time they don’t have to worry about not being able to pin a murder on her because Jennifer has conveniently found where Helen buried Grace Henry’s body (ya remember Grace Henry?), so this time Helen will get more than a nine-month sentence and a slap on the wrist. Also, praise be, writer Romano spared us a tag scene showing Helen behind bars muttering to herself and planning her revenge … I quite liked Next Door Nightmare; though it didn’t really extend the Lifetime formulae any, it was well written by Stephen Romano (I especially liked how quickly he set up the main points of his plot, including just what was wrong with Helen, instead of dawdling for almost an hour of running time the way less talented Lifetime scribes have done), had effective suspense direction by Gordon Yang, and was well acted – especially by Deborah Grover as the lead psycho.