Sisters for Life, a.k.a. Sinister Sorority (MarVista Entertainment, Dawn’s Light Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie turned out to be unexpectedly good – it didn’t really break any new ground in their formulae but it executed the one it did pick quite well. It was called Sisters for Life, a title which provoked my husband Charles to joke, “Actually, that’s the way it usually works” – though as soon became apparent these were sorority sisters, not biological ones. It begins with one of Lifetime’s “teases” in which a woman is shown packing a bag when suddenly a figure in a black hoodie and black gloves sneaks behind her with a rope and strangles her. The scene then cuts to the college where most of the film will take place, and in particular the rush-week meeting of the Beta Delta Chi sorority. The various girls who want to pledge the sorority are subjected to sessions with the student leaders – including the president, Samantha (Camryn Basile) – that seem more like job interviews than anything else, and with only four slots open to new members the choice comes down to Bailee Adams (Briana Femia) and Cori (Taylor Fono). Bailee (and as usual the pretentious spelling of her first name annoys me, though at least she’s a fictional character and it’s writer John Burd, not her parents, that saddled her iwth it – though “Briana” is no great shakes as a woman’s first name either) tells a sob story that she was a twin and her twin sister committed suicide at age 16 while Bailee watched.

She gets the support of Jena (pronounced “Jenna”) Spicer (Maddison Burlock – so in her case both she and her character got stuck with pretentious spellings of their first names!), but the rest of the sorority plumps for Cori because she’s a “legacy” – her mother and grandmother were also Beta Delta Chi members. No problem: Bailee simply corners Cori in the parking lot and smashes her head against the rear window of her own car. Cori survives but is going to need to be in the hospital for months and will miss the fall term at school, leaving an opening at the Beta Delta Chi house which they promptly tap Bailee to fill. Had Christine Conradt written this she probably would have called it The Perfect Sorority Sister, since that’s the particular line of Lifetime clichés Burd’s script (surprisingly well directed by Anna Elizabeth James, yet another woman director given a chance by what once called itself the “Television for Women” network) is putting us through. Bailee fastens her attentions on Jena, getting to be her roommate and making several attempts to sabotage the big biological research project Jena is working on as a lab assistant to her professor, Dr. Leeman (Angel Henson Smith), one of the Black authority figures who abound in Lifetime movies. She also steals a good chunk of the money the sorority has just raised in a fundraiser selling T-shirts, uses it to buy drugs and plants them on one of the other sisters, spiking another sister’s tea with the drug and nearly killing her. She deliberately puts malware on Jena’s computer and then goes Mühchhausen on her, offering to do an all-nighter with her to salvage the data which Dr. Leeman needs for her grant application the next day.

She also sets up Jena’s old friend from grade school, Arielle (Heather Lynn Harris), who since she’s Black looks like writer Burd is setting her up to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Tell Anybody. Arielle gets thrown out of the sorority but this gives her time to research Bailee’s background and find that she really didn’t attend the previous college she said she did, and at the college she did attend she latched on to one of the other sorority girls whose twin sister, Violet (Carolyn Grundman), is still at the other school working at the library. Jena and Arielle visit her there and get Bailee’s back story – when Violet’s sister rejected Bailee’s advances (which included the same sorts of Lesbian passes Bailee has since made at Jena) Bailee killed her – she was the woman Bailee was shown strangling in the prologue – and they figure Bailee probabliy murdered her own twin sister as well. In case you’re wondering where the men are in this presumably co-ed college, the only one we actually see is Jena’s boyfriend Kyle (Tyler Lain), who we first get to see nuzzling Jena on the campus lawn – “Oh, yeah,” I thought, “He’s going to get her pregnant and that’s going to blow her plans for grad school – oops, wrong set of Lifetime clichés.” They do trick out in the men’s shower room (and Charles’ opinion of this movie lightened up considerably when Tyler Lain took off his shirt and we got to see a nice muscular chest), only later Bailee steals Jena’s phone and texts him to do that again, and when he realizes the naked girl coming on to him in the shower is not Jena, he reacts and she responds by shoving him to the floor of the shower room, putting him in the hospital for several weeks. Fortunately, when she left the shower she kept the water running, which according to his doctor inadvertently saved his life.

The movie ends with the big confrontation scene we expect in a Lifetime movie, though somewhat to my surprise Arielle is alive at the end (in most Lifetime movies, if the heroine has a Black best friend we can be measuring the poor Black girl for her coffin almost immediately!) and Bailee is taken into custody, with a tag shot of her in a mental institution obsessing about one of the female nurses taking care of her and apparently seeking to make her the next fly in her spider web … Charles liked Sisters for Life more than most Lifetime movies, and not just because of the hot glimpses of Tyler Lain’s upper bod; it had some of the plot holes in which Lifetime movies abound – notably the fact that no one in the sorority blames Bailee for what’s going wrong even though their troubles started when they admitted her – but the film overall is one of their better efforts even though it’s hardly as creative as The Virgin Sinners (which took place in high school instead of college but also featured a Lesbian subplot) in its use of the Lifetime cliché bank and didn’t have the overpowering theme of religiosity that gave The Virgin Sinners much of its power. Still, it’s well done and powered by better performances than we usually get in Lifetime movies – especially by Briana Femia, who’s neither an eye-rolling psycho nor a deceptively “normal” one but who goes about her business with a matter-of-fact air and a grim determination to get whatever she wants even though writer Burd keeps it powerfully ambiguous as to just what that is.