The Stranger She Brought Home (Reel One Entertainment, Storyteller Studios, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Afterwards Lifetime showed a film called The Stranger She Brought Home that was, if anything, even weirder and more divorced from normal human behavior. This time the heroine in peril is Amelia Green (Lesa Wilson), who works as a 911 operator in Atlanta, and in addition to a hostile work environment – due mainly to her creepy supervisor, Trent Lilley (Don Jeanes), who’s hitting both on her and her co-worker and roommate, Stephanie Marshall (Sara Torres); there’s also a rather withdrawn, squirrelly-looking guy named Michael Tate (Austin Freeman) who’s casting doe eyes at Amelia and obviously has an unrequited crush on her – she also has a compulsion to visit 911 callers in the hospital later and take a souvenir from them. She has a whole shelf in her closet at home – a big house she inherited from her parents when they were killed in a car crash when she was 17, and both Charles and I wondered how she was keeping it up on the meager salary of a 911 dispatcher – consisting of these objets d’art, or whatever you want to call them. Her life starts to go off the rails when she gets a 911 call from someone who’s just been run over by a car while he was fleeing someone; she meets him in the hospital and, when an officious nurse asks who she is and what she’s doing there, she says, “He’s my fiancé.” Meanwhile, Atlanta is being terrorized by a serial killer who targets young women with long red hair and has racked up at least three victims that the police know about.

Because the mystery man, who has somehow got the name “Daniel Jones” attached to him, has no possessions Amelia can plunder for her collection, and because she’s already identified herself to the hospital personnel as his girlfriend, she takes him home when they’re ready to release him and he moves in, sleeps with her and gets at least one semi-hot soft-core porn scene with her. Now, how much do you want to bet that the mystery man Amelia literally picked up from the hospital and allowed to move in with her is the serial killer that’s terrorizing the city? That’s right; in this script by Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick (co-creators of the Whittendale University universe with their sadly departed colleague, Barbara Kymlicka – I say “sadly departed” because I miss being able to joke about the sexually lubricious scripts of the Whittendale films being written by Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker) Our Heroine has moved a serial killer into her home without knowing it. Daniel claims to have lost all his memory as a result of the accident that put him in the hospital and led to the 911 call (by a bystander, not him personally) that put him on Amelia’s radar screen, only shards come back to him and he remembers being chased by someone just before he was run over. One of the other patients Amelia took a souvenir from in the hospital was a 14-year-old Black girl named Sammie Yager, whose mother Tabitha (Vernika Rowe) is suspicious of Amelia’s attentions towards her daughter – and I wondered if Sanders and Dick deliberately reversed the generations on the 1960’s TV show Bewitched, in which the star witch was Samantha and her daughter was named Tabitha. We know Amelia is weird when she tears off the cover of Sammie’s little notebook and adds it to her collection, but quite frankly bringing home a total stranger to add to her collection is so off the beaten path (and so defiant of common sense) it’s hard to work up much sympathy for her.

Amelia’s life explodes into chaos when she comes home one day and finds her roommate Stephanie and her boss Trent in flagrante delicto (Trent immediately suggests that Amelia join them for a three-way; he’s not supposed to be good-looking but I enjoyed watching his bare chest and a couple of nice man pecs). She throws Stephanie out – partly because she’s disgusted that she’s having an affair with Trent and partly because she wants to make room for Daniel – and suggests Stephanie move in with Trent. Only he throws her out because he wasn’t ready for that deep a commitment yet, and though Stephanie is immediately able to find herself a really nice house (once again, Lifetime writers: how do your characters get this much money?),Trent is determined to file a complaint against Amelia and get her fired. Amelia files a complaint against him, too, and the two are confronted by their supervisor, a heavy-set Black woman who basically suspends them both until the complaints are adjudicated. Only this never happens because Daniel, who’s appointed himself as Amelia’s avenging angel, kills Trent and hangs him from a beam on the ceiling of his home to make it look like he committed suicide. Then, partly because he thinks Stephanie is in Amelia’s way and partly because she’s a long-haired redhead and long-haired redheads are his “type,” he kills Stephanie and fakes her death to look like a suicide, too. This finally starts getting Amelia suspicious, especially since she was hiding in Stephanie’s house when Daniel killed her – she’d gone there to try to reason things out with her but failed – and Daniel knocks her unconscious. Of course he’s wearing the black hoodie that’s become obligatory for Lifetime assailants so you can’t immediately tell what gender they are, but when Amelia comes to Daniel takes the hoodie off and reveals himself.

He says he didn’t mean to hurt Amelia and was just taking care of the people in her life who were screwing her over so the two of them could live happily ever after (one of the most endearing conceits of Lifetime movies is how their villains think they can achieve a happy ending with the objects of their obsessions despite the long trail of corpses they’ve left behind in their pursuits), and she pretends to go along with her but behind his back she grabs a fireplace poker, intending to hit him over the head with it. This happens about half an hour before the end, and the rest is a cat-and-mouse game as he catches her trying to assault him, he overpowers her and starts to strangle her until … well, while all this was going on Amelia at least discovered who “Daniel Jones” really was. His real name was Henry Danvers, and when he was a boy he witnessed his dad murder his mom and the experience freaked him out for life. He never had amnesia in the hospital; he was just faking it so Amelia would take him in and give him a shot at a new life – and when he had his accident that put him in the hospital and brought him to Amelia’s attentions he’d been running away from a woman named Whitney Ann Davis (Ashley Goodson), yet another Southern redhead who had attracted his sinister attentions, only her boyfriend Lance caught him and chased him away. (Whitney ruefully explains to Amelia – and to us – that as a result of the experience Lance is now her ex-boyfriend.)

Amelia tracks down Whitney and thus unwittingly leads Daniel to her, only when he shows up intending to eliminate her she’s got a gun ready (this is the South, after all!) and shoots him in the chest. He doesn’t die immediately but he’s wounded, and later when he confronts Amelia for the Big Climax she grabs a pair of scissors, intending to stab him fatally (yet another sign that writers Sanders and Dick and their director, Dave Thomas, worship at the shrine of St. Alfred Hitchcock; scissors are the weapon with which Grace Kelly killed her would-be murderer in Dial “M” for Murder), she too doesn’t kill him but aims her scissors in the already open wound, and at the end Daniel tries to strangle Amelia but the combination of the two wounds finally overcomes him and takes him out just in time for him to loosen his grip on her. It also turns out that she called 911 but, having barely survived an attempted strangulation, was unable actually to say much to the dispatcher – only guess who the dispatcher was? That’s right: Michael, the twitchy hanger-on at the back of the office whose clearly unrequited crush on Amelia might as well have stamped “Red Herring” on his forehead, and in the end he goes to visit her at the hospital, she thanks him for saving her life, and there’s a hint that his crush on her might not be so unrequited after all … I had thought The Stranger She Brought Home would have been about a single woman cruising the bars (or whatever serves their purpose these days), bringing a guy home and then having him develop an obsession over her and start stalking her while all she wanted from him was one good fuck and then to leave her alone. Instead it turned out to be this quirky melodrama from the Whittendale folks, with some good neo-Gothic suspense effects from director Thomas (Amelia’s house, which doesn’t look like it’s been redecorated in about a century, practically becomes a character on its own, and like Framed by My Husband, The Stranger She Brought Home has plenty of shots taking place on staircases where the characters confront each other, yet another touch Hitchcock was famous for!) but a silly plot and a heroine with such a strange obsession it’s hard to like her and identify with her as a victim.