Do You Trust Your Boyfriend?, a.k.a. Killer Profile (MarVista Entertainment, Shadowboxer LLC, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a movie called Do You Trust Your Boyfriend?, originally shot under the title Killer Profile and directed by Ted Campbell from a script by Richard Pierce. It takes place in the (presumably) fictitious “Griffith Peak” high school in Los Angeles and concerns Nicole Ramos (Lawson Greyson), a high-school senior who’s surrounded by way more authority figures than she deserves: she’s taking a journalism class taught by her mom Madelyn (Gina Simms), who’s also dating the school principal, Lockhart (Michael Scovotti). It’s not clear what happened to Micole’s dad, though the hints we get are that he started running around with a younger woman (or maybe more than one) and that broke up his marriage to Madelyn. Nicole comes equipped with the obligatory best friends, a Black girl named Angie (Alexis Samone) whom she’s known since seventh grade and a nerdy-looking girl named Cass (Luka Oida). We know she’s a nerd because she wears glasses and is good with computers. Nicole is dating the school’s basketball star, Liam (Derek Rivera, a nice-looking but rather nondescript fellow who did little aesthetically for either Charles or I), but to test his fidelity she decides to create a fictitious profile for a girl named “Heather Harris” and direct-message Liam with a series of inducements, including a nude photo (which Nicole actually picked up at random on the Internet), to see if he’ll take the bait and try to meet “Heather.” Only a real student named Heather Harris (Kendall Kato) shows up at Griffith Peak wearing a T-shirt from another high school, Gibson, and having all the same interests as the fictional “Heather” Nicole created for her profile.

When Liam responds to “Heather” with the magic words, “I have a girlfriend,” Nicole decides she’s made her point and deletes the account (which is on a fictional social-media site called “FlashBack,” obviously because the producers didn’t want to face a royalty demand from Mark Zuckerberg for calling it “Facebook”), but her Black best friend Angie decides to restore it and keep it going to see if she can catch other cheaters (sort of like the real-life site Ashley Madison, which was supposedly for men interested in meeting women other than their wives to have affairs, but ended up being mostly women out to catch their husbands looking for other partners). She catches Cass’s boyfriend Isaac (Kemp Connelly, who for my money was a lot hotter than Derek Rivera!) responding to the “Heather” posts and tells Cass, who’s left furious with her former friends for the ruse. At first I thought the appearance of a real-life “Heather Harris” at Griffith Peak High was a big piece of coincidence-mongering on the part of writer Pierce, but as the show wound on we learned that the real Heather was actually a woman named Jenny with a basket-case mother named Ruth (Meredith Thomas, whose imdb.com biography lists her as having been born on August 28 but doesn’t tell us what year, though she made her movie debut in an uncredited role in the 1996 film Pleasantville and you can do the math). Ruth doesn’t seem to be drinking or doing drugs (the usual indicia of bad motherhood in Lifetime films) but she’s had a heart attack, she’s never forgiven Jenny for abandoning her childhood dreams of becoming a great dancer (she still keeps a scrapbook with a photo of her as a kid in a tutu), and she’s totally unaware that Jenny is not only attending a new school but is doing so under the name “Heather.”

Jenny had to transfer from Gibson High after she pushed down a flight of stairs and killed the boy she was dating, Troy (Anthony Caro – we saw her burying him, still wearing her gold lamé prom dress and high heels, since she killed him on the night of the prom, but we see him in a flashback showing how he died). Most of the film consists of Heather’s guerrilla campaign against Nicole, whom she accuses of destroying her life and ensuring that she wouldn’t be received well at Griffith Peak because Nicole’s fake “Heather” posts had made her seem like a “fast” girl and she was getting all sorts of skuzzy proposals from horny male students. Not only does Heather try to seduce Liam away from Nicole by claiming to be “interviewing” him for the school paper (which seems to be a Web site instead of a physical print publication), she erases Nicole’s article and substitutes one of her own about the affair between the principal and Nicole’s mom, publishing it under Nicole’s name and leading Nicole’s mom Madelyn to ground her and treat her with all the sensitivity of a commandant at Auschwitz. Heather also spikes Angie’s drinking water at a cheerleading practice (though this wasn’t being shown under Lifetime’s annual “Fear the Cheer” festival, it has enough of a cheerleading subplot to qualify – and I was amused at the unintended eroticism of the cheer at the basketball games, “Dribble, dribble, dribble! Shoot, shoot, shoot!”) with prescription drugs she stole from her mom, and she collapses in the middle of a practice and injures herself badly enough to end up in the hospital. In fact quite a few of the dramatis personae end up in the hospital thanks to Heather’s ministrations, including Isaac (she strikes him with a blunt object about 45 minutes into the movie, and though the character survives we don’t get to see hot young Kemp Connelly again, darnit) and Liam, whom she strikes with a baseball bat when he won’t yield to her charms. (One wonders what a baseball bat is doing on the basketball court.)

It all ends with Heather taking Nicole and her friend Cass (ya remember Cass?), whom Heather somehow finagled into using her computer skills to give her a phony transcript that admitted her into Griffith Peak High) to her so-called “favorite spot” where she buried Tyler, and about to kill both Nicole and Cass when Nicole’s mother Madelyn (ya remember Madelyn?) comes along, wallops Heather and saves the day. The final scene is Heather in a cell – we’re not sure whether it’s a prison or a mental hospital – still scheming about how to use other people to achieve her mom’s ideals of “perfection.” Do You Trust Your Boyfriend? is a not-bad Lifetime thriller, and Kendall Cato does the bad girl to perfection – she comes off like an adolescent version of Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (especially as played by Patty McCormick in the original film) and one guesses this is how Rhoda would have turned out if she’d remained alive (as she does at the end of Maxwell Anderson’s original play before it was bowdlerized for film at the behest of the Production Code Administration, which insisted she had to be punished for her killings) and the Kafka-esque plight it puts Nicole through. But for the most part it’s pretty ordinary and it suffers from the absence of men (aside from Liam, Isaac, the principal and Troy in his brief flashback we hardly see any males in this supposedly co-ed high school, and as I mentioned earlier Isaac exits way too soon) and a relatively homely set of women (straight men won’t get much more of a charge from this film than Charles and I did!). It also suffers from some pretty formulaic writing and a lot of loose ends in the plot, most notably that we have no idea how the fake “Heather” got Cass to hack into the school’s computer and post her phony student record.