Lethal Love Triangle (MarVista Entertainment, Dawn’s Light Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime showed another “premiere” and it was a good deal better than the common run of their recent productions even though it was deceptively titled Lethal Love Triangle. (The working title, and one which would have more accurately reflected its content, is A Criminal Affair.)The imdb.com synopsis – “Two students become engrossed with their handsome research subject until his true nature puts them in harm’s way”. – is also misleading. It begins in a college class on abnormal psychology whose professor, Dr. Deanna Stone (April Martucci), assigns her students a project: they’re supposed to pair up to research a real-life criminal case and interview the real-life criminal, then write a paper about him (or, presumably, her). Julia Monroe (Savvy Shay), the professor’s research assistant (which means she’s doing a lot of the leg work to write papers the professor will get sole credit for – the use of assistants to do the heavy lifting on a project the professor gets the money and the rep for is one of real-life academe’s ongoing scandals), teams up with her roommate and best friend, Erin Valdez (Taylor Stammen), to research the case of Cole James Heller (Jacob Taylor – gee, if he and Taylor Stammen got married in real life she’d be Taylor Taylor), who was convicted 12 years earlier for murdering Bruce and Robin McCord, a couple who had taken him in and befriended him. His supposed motives were romantic obsession and jealousy – apparently he had the hots for Robin, she turned him down, so he killed her and her husband for good measure – but he’s maintained his innocence through the 12 years he’s been in prison.

Julia and Erin visit him in prison and he asks if they’re prisoner groupies – he’s received 17 letters from women offering to marry him because they’re turned on by the idea of being with a murderer (such women also exist in real life and one of them actually married Charles Manson a year or two before he died). When they assure him they aren’t, he agrees to talk to them but still insists he didn’t commit the murders. Within a week Cole’s case has been reopened and DNA evidence has supposedly tied the crime to serial rapist Mick Jackson, who once he was exposed apparently killed himself after leaving a note confessing to the crime. Julia and Erin are startled when they see Cole on the college campus attempting to ingratiate himself with them and thank them for getting his case re-examined and setting him free. Indeed, Erin does more than just becoming friends with him; in the movie’s one hot soft-core porn scene the two of them go at it in Cole’s motel room, where he fucks her against a wall because they’re too hot for each other even to wait to get into bed. Despite the film’s title (it was written by Kelly Peters, Amy Katherine Taylor and Daniel West, and West also directed), Erin is the only woman we actually see Cole involved with; he puts the make on Julia later on but she kisses him but goes no farther. Julia and Erin deduce that Cole may have been working with an accomplice outside prison to set up Mick Jackson for the crime, kill him and fake it to look like a suicide so Cole would be released, and the writers drop a hint about 42 minutes into the running time that Dr. Stone may be his accomplice.

For the next 45 minutes or so we’re led to believe that she was the obsessive lover of Cole and it was because of his conviction that she got out of the business of profiling criminal defendants and testifying as an expert witness at trials, until Dr. Stone is herself murdered. Before that happens, Erin is apparently killed in her car and the police, led by Detective Harry Booker (Terry Woodberry), one of those avuncular African-American authority figures with which Lifetime movies abound, suspect Cole. Indeed, Booker is shown as a Javert-like character, sure that Cole was actually guilty of the original murders and faked the evidence exonerating him with the aid of his outside accomplice. Eventually, in a “surprise” ending that for once in a Lifetime movie is genuinely surprising (though we’ve been dropped a hint of it in a scene in Cole’s motel room in which Julia drops by to visit, Cole flirts with her and when she leaves a long-haired woman who was already in bed with him says, ini a peevishly jealous manner, “Don’t you ever stop?”), the accomplice turns out to be Erin, who’s really Hannah McCord, daughter of the original victims. It seems Hannah, even though she was still pre-pubescent, formed a puppy-love crush on Cole and dreamed of being with him. After her parents died – the crime for which Cole was convicted but which Detective Booker ultimately deduces was a murder-suicide (Bruce McCord suspected his wife of having an affair with Cole – which she really wasn’t – so he shot her and then himself) – she was given a “closed” adoption by the Valdez family but she never forgot her real origins or the hunky young man she’d had the hots for when she was still a kid.

The climax takes place in the college library – where Julia has arranged to meet Cole in hopes of getting him to confess to Erin’s murder while Det. Booker listens in. She ushers a male student (the only one we’ve seen!) out of the library just at closing time – we glimpsed him earlier but, though he’s a nice-looking man (indeed, I found him sexier than Jacob Taylor, who according to the plot is supposed to be The Man No Woman Can Resist but seemed just ordinarily attractive to me – and quite frankly I wondered how someone that boyishly cute could have survived 12 years in prison without his Gay cherry being popped by his fellow inmates), he’s just a red herring. Erin enters the library and uses a Taser to knock out Det. Booker, then goes to work on Julia, apparently intending either to grab Cole for herself by eliminating the competition or kill him, too, if he resists her – only Booker comes to in time to arrest her before she can kill Julia, and blessedly there isn’t one of those annoying open-ended tag scenes Lifetime has been doing a lot of lately that makes it look like Erin will escape and come back to harass the other characters. There also, blessedly, isn’t a scene pairing up Julia and Cole at the end; instead Julia has taken over Dr. Stone’s class as an adjunct professor (another way colleges exploit graduate students by making them do the grunt work of undergraduate teaching at a fraction of the pay full professors get), and there’s a hint that she may also take over the job of writing a book about Cole Heller and his case that Dr. Stone had got a publisher to accept just before she died.

Despite the misleading title and published synopsis, Lethal Love Triangle is actually an unusually good Lifetime thriller; it moves in the familiar clichéd grooves, but the ending is genuinely surprising and Daniel West is better than most Lifetime directors at creating suspense and Gothic atmosphere even in plain workaday locations. The plot may be as improbable as all get-out, but at least it’s told with a sense of style, it’s relatively coherent and West and his co-writers avoid one mistake Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Stefano made in Psycho. In Robert Bloch’s original novel, Norman Bates was a middle-aged recluse (indeed, when I read the book I wondered if Bloch had based him on his real-life friend H. P. Lovecraft) who had killed his mother in his early 20’s. In writing the script, Joseph Stefano suggested to Hitchcock that they make Norman Bates a young man – a suggestion Hitchcock eagerly accepted because that would mean being able to cast a boyish young actor like Anthony Perkins in the role – but they never changed the time frame of Norman having murdered his mom 15 years earlier, so he must have been 12 or so when he committed the crime. For a while I thought West and his collaborators were going to make the same mistake – to ask us to believe Erin/Hannah could have murdered her parents while she was still a young girl – which wouldn’t be impossible but would be quite a bit hard to take. Fortunately, they gave us a different and more credible explanation for the original crime.