Deadly Debutante (Almost Never Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

After nine hours and 15 minutes of the Global Citizen concerts, it was almost a relief to switch to Lifetime for their usual Saturday night “premiere” movie, Deadly Debutante. There’s some confusion about the title because imdb.com also lists it as Deadly Debutantes – plural – and A Night to Die For. It takes place in a generic small town called Newton, though the community is large enough to have a well-established 1 percent, and their high school has had an elaborate “Debutantes’ Ball” contest for over 100 years in which one girl is crowned “Belle of the Ball” and gets to go to the college of her choice on a full-ride scholarship as the first prize. Directed by Lindsay Hartley – a familiar name to Lifetime watchers, but mostly as an actress – from a script by Mark Valenti (so once again a woman director is stuck, in a story about women’s psychologies, with a script by a man!), Deadly Debutantes is about the rivalry for the Belle of the Ball contest between two entrants in particular. One is Anna Phillips (Angelina Boris), spoiled rich-bitch daughter of 1-percenters Howard (Michael Wagemann) and Diana (Leah N. H. Philpott) Phillips. Anna is pissed off at her parents because they’re always dashing off to “business” dinners instead of staying home with her, but she loves having access to their money and being able to throw parties in their home because they’re away so often. Her rival for the contest is Sophia Martinez (Natalia De Mendoza), an intellectual student and a potential fiction writer who’s being sponsored by her English teacher, Blair Dennison (Angela Baumgartner), to run in the debutantes’ contest because if she wins she can use the scholarship award to go to Webster University, which is otherwise too far out of her reach money-wise. Sophia is living with her father, who’s raised her as a single parent since the death of her mother a year or so earlier. Sophia has no money or social position, but she charms the contest judges – and her sob story about the recent death of her mom doesn’t hurt either (she could give Joe Biden lessons in turning personal tragedy into political advantage!).

Meanwhile, sinister things start happening around Anna – the lights go out at one of her parties and it turns out someone broke in and turned out her circuit breakers; later on someone tries to run her down, and after that someone slashes the tire of her car. (Aside from Sophia, who borrows her dad’s car when she needs one, this is yet another of those annoying movies in which every high-school student seems to have their own car, a present from their parents when they reach driving age. If my mom had been able to afford to do that for me, maybe I would have learned to drive, too!) Anna needs to turn in an essay as part of the debutantes’ contest, and since she’s too lazy to write her own and doesn’t trust her own writing skills anyway (they’re supposed to turn in the usual pretentious pap about what they plan to do to make the world a better place and help the underprivileged – though in my head I thought that Anna could have triumphed by writing an Ayn Rand-ian essay about how the underprivileged are where they’re supposed to be and the world should be more unequal so the superior rich people can have the resources they deserve and not have to share them with their inferiors. My remix of the movie along these lines would reveal the contest judges secretly agreeing with her, not daring to say so in public, but giving her the prize anyway on the ground that whatever you thought of her ideas, she expressed them vividly and eloquently) she buys an essay from the school’s male intellectual, Marvin. She bribes him with a promise of tickets to an upcoming Billie Eilish concert (ironically I was watching this just after I’d seen the real Billie Eilish on the Global Citizen Webcast!), but with no time to write a fresh essay for her he gives her one he wrote for a class assignment the previous year. The school authorities note the similarity and accuse Anna of plagiarism, but her dad’s influence over the school (and the rest of the town) is strong enough the incident is hushed up and she gets away with it.

Anna gets the chance to turn in another essay, and this time she scores one from her friend and fellow debutante contestant Mia (Revell Carpenter), who drafted one for her own entry but hadn’t turned it in yet. This time Anna bribes Mia with a $2,000 fur-lined leather jacket in exchange for giving her the essay and withdrawing from the contest (leading to a scene in which Mia’s mom lambasts her for dropping out and giving up her dreams for a fancy piece of clothing). Only the deal turns out to be nearly fatal for Mia when an unseen assailant pushes her off a balcony on campus, nearly killing her, and since she was wearing Anna’s jacket Anna deduces that she, not Mia, was the intended victim. Mia ends up in the hospital – Anna brings her flowers and Mia says she’d rather have painkillers (which made me wonder if they’d show Anna scoring some from a drug dealer on or near campus, but fortunately Mark Valenti avoided that particular set of Lifetime clichés) and the story proceeds to the night of the big debutantes’ contest. Anna angrily broke up with her boyfriend Kenny (Raymond Roberts), captain of the school’s football team, when he made a date with Sophia – ostensibly so she could tutor him to help keep up his grades so he didn’t get cut from the team – and Anna heard about it from her “friends” and didn’t bother to find out the truth. Deadly Debutante was a reasonably good Lifetime thriller (and the sight of all those hot young women wearing as little in the chest department as the standards of basic cable would allow no doubt turned on some of the straight guys watching this!) but it suffered from being too obvious.

I knew who the person who was sabotaging the contest and attempting to drive Anna out of it was from the first act: it was [spoiler alert!] Anna’s English teacher and unofficial contest sponsor, Blair Dennison, though I got her motive wrong. Judging from the smoldering close-ups of Andrea Baumgardner staring intently at Natalia De Mendoza, I thought it was going to be one of Lifetime’s “psycho mentor” stories, the monster woman who “helps” the young protégée because she never made it herself and wants the girl to have the career, fame and money she thought she deserved. I was even wondering whether the payoff would be that Dennison had an unrequited Lesbian crush on Sophia, but the actual resolution was far less kinky than that. It turns out that Blair was a debutante contestant herself in her high-school days and, since her mom and her grandmother had both won, she thought she had a “lock” on it – only Diane, who eventually became Anna Phillips’ mother, used her family’s power and influence to buy the contest title herself. So Blair never forgave her and hatched a plot that when Diane’s daughter Anna became eligible for the contest, she would pick someone else to sponsor and do whatever she had to, including murder, to make sure her candidte won instead of Anna. Mark Valenti did pull one surprise I wasn’t expecting; instead of having Sophia win the contest after all, since neither she nor Anna is available for the final event – a ceremonial walk to the judges’ podium accompanied by their fathers (one wonders what they’d do if a contestant’s father, not her mother, had died) – because Blair has knocked Sophia’s dad unconscious and Anna’s dad is frantically looking for her because Blair has grabbed her and is holding a gun on her – the judges announce that both Anna and Sophia are disqualified and the contest goes to the third-place winner, Nicole Green (Christina Susanna Patterson). It felt good to my anti-racist heart to see a Black contestant win the prize, but I felt sorry for Sophia that after all she’d been through, including being falsely accused of attempted murder, she wouldn’t get the big prize that would get her into college and launch her writing career. I also felt that Valenti had been weird to give her Kenny as a boyfriend (he takes the bullet Blair fired at Anna and/or Sophia – by that time it’s not clear whom she’s more mad at – though he recovers) when it was clear that Marvin, the campus “brainiac,” was more right for her. After all, I was a high-school brainiac and I ended up marrying another brainiac …