Killer Cheer Mom (Hybrid LLC, Mayor Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime offered two “premieres” in their latest series of movies about cheerleaders, “Fear the Cheer.” They do a series of these every year around the opening of school, and I’ve long believed part of their motivation is that the word “cheerleader,” with its promise of nubile, scantily clad young women strutting their stuff on camera and exposing everything the rules of basic cable will allow, is one of the three buzz words why this network, which once proclaimed itself as ‘television for women,” can attract straight men to their audience. (The other two buzz words for the straight male audience are “sorority” and “escort.”) I hadn’t expected the two movies to differ so dramatically in quality, but they did: the first one, Killer Cheer Mom – despite a title that’s not only dorky in itself but serves as a “spoiler” – actually turned out to be a taut, exciting, attention-gripping thriller within the Lifetime genre, while the second, Pom Poms and Payback, was just silly. The dramatis personae of Killer Cheer Mom are Riley Dillon (Courtney Fulk, a name that seems destined to inspire bad jokes even though she’s quite good in the role), who has been raised by her dad James (Thomas Calabro) as a single parent since the death of her mom years before. Only suddenly, as she was approaching her junior year in high school, her dad has married a new wife, Amanda Blakely (Denise Richards, top-billed), and at her insistence has changed jobs and moved to suburbia, uprooting Riley from her familiar surroundings and friend circle in the middle of high school.

She makes one friend on her first day at school, Blaine (Jasmine Putmon), though since Blaine is Black and hardened Lifetime movie watchers like me know the all too common fate of The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine, we start mentally measuring her for her coffin almost as soon as she appears. She also meets a hot-looking young man named Cooper Morris (a young actor billed as Jay Jay Warren – his birth name is James Wray Warren II and he is hot, far sexier than the usual twerpy actors who play the age-peer boyfriends of put-upon high school girls in Lifetime movies, and he’s a phenomenal actor as well), who turns out to be the brother of Chloe Morris (Holly J. Barrett), captain of the school’s cheerleading team. As you might guess from the title, stepmom Amanda becomes obsessed with getting Riley onto the cheerleading squad, even though there are five other girls trying out for just two open spots. Amanda volunteers for the PTA (are Parent-Teacher Associations really a going “thing” in 2021? I remember them from my own grade-school years!) so she can have an excuse to be on the campus of Hamilton High School a lot and keep a watchful eye on the cheer squad and the other girls who are either on it already or trying out. She “accidentally” bumps into Ariel (Tristina Lee, the squad’s Black member, who previously played a similar role in another “Fear the Cheer” Lifetime movie, Dying to Be a Cheerleader) and plants a bottle of prescription steroids (with no name in the slot that usually indicates who it was prescribed to) in Ariel’s backpack.

That gets Ariel suspended from the cheer squad, only that’s not good enough for ambitious Amanda: she also downloads a video online from an anonymous source of a Black and a white teenage girl drinking beer while declaiming about the joys of weekend partying and underage drinking. She uses Photoshop-style video editing software (we already learned from writer Anna White that she was a video editor in her previous career) to take this video and splice on the faces of Ariel and another white cheerleader, Tiana (Mia Rose Frampton, Peter Frampton’s daughter), then posts it online. Of course it goes viral around the school and both Ariel and Tiana are permanently expelled from the cheer squad by the officious but sympathetic coach, Toni (Dominique Toney, yet another African-American authority figure in a Lifetime movie). Then, after Chloe gives Riley a ride home and they step inside so Amanda can make them smoothies, Amanda makes an excuse and cuts the brake line of Chloe’s car so she’ll have an “accident” on one of the steep, winding roads that abound in the area and take herself off the cheerleading squad – and the planet – permanently. Only Chloe is injured but not killed in the accident, but the cop assigned to investigate it, Detective Sanchez (Tia Texada), immediately leaps to the conclusion that Riley sabotaged Chloe’s car to eliminate one more young woman standing between her and a slot on the cheer squad. Riley goes to the hospital to see Chloe and her brother Connor, who got assigned to be her partner in biology lab and whom she’s been dating – and the scene between the two of them in the hospital is the most powerful moment in Jay Jay Warren’s performance, as without saying a word he goes from overall sadness at his sister’s life-threatening accident to desperate emotion as he hugs Riley for comfort to revulsion as he comes to believe (unfairly but understandably) that she caused his sister’s accident. (I told you the man is more than just a pretty face and a hot bod!)

What’s more, everybody in the school gives Riley the cold shoulder after Chloe’s accident – except for Blaine, who stays her friend and helps her research Amanda’s background. Riley discovers a clue – a puddle of brake fluid in her dad’s driveway where the stuff leaked out after Amanda cut the hose – that convinces her Amanda is the culprit (though why she didn’t figure it out earlier since Amanda is the only other person who could possibly have sabotaged Chloe’s car is a mystery to me – it’s the same plot hole as in the otherwise great 1947 thriller Lured, directed by Douglas Sirk and featuring great dramatic performances by George Sanders and Lucille Ball, and a movie I like writing about if only because people aren’t expecting to see “great dramatic performance” and “Lucille Ball” in the same sentence; Sanders’ character is suspected of being a serial killer because the killer wrote notes on Sanders’ typewriter, and Sanders never suspects his roommate even though he’s the only other person with access to the typewriter). One thing she has to go on in searching for Amanda’s real past is the story Amanda once told her that before she met Riley’s father she was involved with a man named Tim, whom she was deeply in love with and was making plans for a long-term future, only just as they were about to get married Tim committed suicide. In a quite creative (if somewhat obvious) use of irony in Anna White’s script, Amanda tells Riley, “You never know what’s really going on in someone else’s head.”

Riley realizes that she’ll have to go to Chicago to trace the mystery but she doesn’t have a car, so she needs to find someone who does and is willing to take her there. She first asks Blaine, but Blaine isn’t willing to cut school for the afternoon. So she asks Cooper, whom she has managed to convince that she didn’t cause the accident that disabled Chloe – Amanda did – and the two first steal Amanda’s cell phone and copy the list of addresses stored on it. Then they drive to Chicago to check out the addresses, and the first is the office of Amanda’s former therapist, Dr. Shaeffer (Jon Bridell), who tells them that due to doctor-patient confidentiality he can’t share any information about “Amanda” – or, as Riley and Cooper have found her real name is, Mallory Rivers. Apparently Anna Brown hasn’t heard of the exception to doctor-patient confidentiality (or, as I like to call it, “medical omertá,” after the code of silence of the Mafia) that not only allows but requires a therapist to warn the authorities if a patient poses an immediate danger to him/herself or others – either that or she’s drawing Riley and Connor as unaware of that law. Nonetheless, they’re able to trace a woman named Sarah Anders (Sonia Rockwell), whose ex-husband Timothy Anders was Mallory’s/Amanda’s former boyfriend until he refused to leave his wife for her. So Mallory/Amanda decided to eliminate the competition by cutting the brake cables on Sarah’s car, only that morning Tim and Sarah decided to switch cars and so Tim was the one who lost control of his car at 120 miles per hour on a mountain road and was killed in the crash – though the car was so badly damaged they couldn’t do a forensic examination of the wreck, they thus never found that the brakes had been sabotaged, and the cops officially ruled Tim’s death a suicide.

Once they realize who Amanda really is and what’s going on, Connor and Riley plan to go to the authorities – only Amanda sneaks up behind Riley and knocks her out, and when she comes to she’s in a garage, tied up, and Amanda has poured gasoline all over the floor and plans to light it and incinerate her. Just then Riley’s dad James, worried because Riley hasn’t been returning his cell phone calls, uses a tracker app to find the location of her phone and rescues his daughter just before the police – who’ve been called by Riley’s friend Blaine, the one person in the cast who’s realized what the numbers “911” mean – arrive and take Amanda/Mallory/whatever her name is into custody. Though Brown’s script follows a lot of the usual Lifetime tropes, at least she keeps the story within range of believability and she’s aided by the high-tension suspense direction of Randy Carter, who’s directed for Lifetime before (including one of last year’s “Fear the Cheer” movies, Cheer Camp Killer), and a highly potent cast. Denise Richards navigates the minefield of traps for actors (of either gender) playing movie psychos and makes Amanda neither too obviously evil nor too unbelievably good-on-the-surface (the revolution Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins wrought in the film Psycho but which has had diminishing returns for most of the people who’ve tried it since). She’s utterly believable as a woman who’s been knocked around by life and whose traumas have either knocked her personality askew or triggered mental illnesses she already had.

And her performance is matched by the people playing sympathetic characters, including Courtney Fulk as a more believable protagonist than usual; though I still think it took her longer than it should have to figure out that Amanda sabotaged Chloe’s car, otherwise she shows a good deal more independence and agency than your usual Lifetime “pussy in peril.” Indeed, the cast in general is quite well assembled – Holly J. Barrett makes Chloe a sympathetic character rather than the snobbish elitist cheer captains usually are in these movies, and as for Jay Jay Warren I’ve already praised him as not only drop-dead gorgeous but unusually talented: I want to see a lot more of him! About the only glitch in the casting is the reverse of one of my frequent pet peeves about movies; I’ve suffered through a lot of films (and not just on Lifetime, either!) in which I’m expected to believe that two people who hardly look at all similar are supposed to be biological relatives. Here, casting directors Dean E. Fronk and Donald Paul Pemnick created the opposite problem: Denise Richards and Courtney Fulk look so much alike, both women of medium height with similar facial structures and matching long blonde hair hanging down straight from their scalps, they’d be more believable as blood relatives than they are as stepmother and stepdaughter. Still, that’s at most a minor flaw in one of Lifetime’s better productions overall.