Psycho Intern (JohnFox Pictures, Foundation Media Partners, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night I ended up falling back on my usual habits on weekend evenings when my husband Charles is working and, even though he wasn’t working last night, we ended up watching the latest Lifetime “premiere,” Psycho Intern. At first both Charles and I had assumed this was a medical drama and the titular psycho intern would be a doctor-in-training. Instead the script by Matt Fitzsimmons and Ken Miyamoto – directed by Ann Forry, one of the promising women directors Lifetime and its production companies have given a boost to but also saddled with a pretty clichéd script (her only other feature-length credit is for a film called Shall We Play?, in which a teenage woman is possessed by a horror app she downloads onto her phone, which sounds interesting). The titular psycho intern is Alex Dalos (Madison Smith, who’s cute in a twinkie-ish way but I wish Forry, who before she became a director worked as a casting director, could have found a more genuinely sexy young man for the role), who in the opening scene is in a car with his parents. His dad, who has been belittling him all his young life, starts insulting him again (this was reminding me of the book I’m currently reading, Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough; Mary Trump is Donald Trump’s niece and much of her book is about how Donald’s father Fred Trump continually belittled her father, Donald’s brother Fred Trump, Jr., and ultimately destroyed his life). In a fury Alex grabs the car’s steering wheel, it veers off the road and …

When next we see Alex he shows up for an intern job at a computer software company called Newmark which is in the process of pitching a hospital chain (so the film had something to do with medicine, after all!) on a new program which will make the company millions. The person in charge of the presentation is Maya Taylor (Lifetime regular Emmanuelle Vaugier), who already has a personal assistant, Kate (Erika Bruci), who’s racially ambiguous but is visibly enough of a person of color we fear she’s going to end up being the Heroine’s Black (or Latino, Asian or whatever) Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Our Heroine. Alex shows up and of course, in the great tradition of Lifetime psychos, at first he couldn’t be more helpful, color-coding all Maya’s files and helping her with her presentation. Alas, he’s also plotting to seduce Maya and will knock out anyone who stands in his way of getting Maya both professionally and personally – including Kate, whom he follows while they’re both driving home from the office, runs her off the road with his car, leaves her for dead and is about to finish the job with a tire iron when he’s distracted by another passing driver. Instead Kate ends up in the hospital, hors de combat, and Alex – who’s now using the last name “Preston” – helps Maya pull the presentation together. She has a rival at the company to contend with, Frank, an old-school sexist investor the company’s founder brought in to attract financial backing, who makes it clear that he doesn’t think a woman should be in charge of such an important presentation and he can do a better job of landing the account with his old-school schmoozing on the golf course. But Alex takes care of Frank, too; having overheard him say that he’s deathly allergic to peppers, he spikes Frank’s salad with peppers and Frank goes into an allergic reaction that proves fatal. (One wonders why someone with that serious an allergy doesn’t carry around an EpiPen; even though the price of EpiPens has been jacked up to such ridiculous levels they’ve become a test case for pharmaceutical price gouging, someone in Frank’s position could surely afford them!)

On the night of the Big Presentation, Maya and Alex are alone in the Newmark office after hours and they celebrate landing the contract with a bottle of wine. Maya gets drunk and lustful enough that she yields to his advances and they make love (and though Ann Forry isn’t terribly interested in the soft-core porn aspects of this action, still the sight of Madison Smith taking his shirt off and unbuckling his belt gave me a thrill). Then, of course, she feels guilty about it and tries to get their relationship back to a strictly business level – and then he tells her that the last company he interned for went out of business after he filed a sexual harassment suit against its CEO, a woman Maya’s age, that ultimately put it out of business. Meanwhile Maya has already started seeing someone else, a local man named Bill who runs an art gallery which is really a promotion for his actual business designing corporate logos. They get serious enough that ultimately the climax occurs at Maya’s home, where she’s invited Bill and also Emma has returned home on a break from her college. By this time Maya has already fired Alex, but he’s planned his revenge; in addition to having the security code for her alarm system (meaning he can enter her house any time he pleases), he’s also set off in search of Emma so he could seduce her and show up at Maya’s as her daughter’s new boyfriend. Interestingly, the script makes it clear that he and Emma haven’t actually had sex – though if they had this would be an even kinkier movie than it is (I had visions of Alex asking mother and daughter to join him in a three-way!) – because he’s not attracted to women his age.

Then we get Alex’s backstory: when he ran his parents’ car off the road he intended to kill his father and spare his mother. Instead the opposite happened: his dad’s seat belt held and his airbag deployed, saving his life, while his mom’s seat belt tore and she was flung 30 feet out of the car and died. So, having staged the whole thing to get rid of dad, Alex clubbed him with a tire iron and the police and paramedics simply assumed he’d died of his injuries in the accident. Since then he’s cruised the world looking for situations in which he can intern with older women in positions of power (his mom had run her own company while it wasn’t clear what his dad’s career was, except that it was considerably below hers in both status and pay), seduce them and then threaten them with ruin if they don’t continue to have sex with him. Alex shows up at Maya’s with a gun, though it’s not clear just whom he intends to kill with it, and Bill grabs a knife and tries to attack him with it. He’s able to get Alex to drop the gun but not to subdue him, whereupon the good people’s lives are saved by a deus ex machina in the form of Kate (ya remember Kate?), whom Alex has already tried to kill twice – once on the road and once in the hospital (he tried to smother her but was interrupted by a nurse telling him that visiting hours were over) – and who has had the good sense to call 911. Kate manages to grab Alex’s gun and shoot him with it, and apparently he dies. There wasn’t the tag scene I was dreading in which Alex turns up alive in a mental hospital and tries to seduce the older woman running the place (a Lifetime trope that’s getting pretty annoying).

Ann Forry stages this story with some intriguing visual effects, including bathing the screen in a red or blue glow to make Alex more sinister, and the result is a slightly better-than-average Lifetime movie even though she’s unable to get a good performance out of Madison Smith. The whole trope of the seemingly nice young man who turns out to be a psycho killer has been done to death since Alfred Hitchcock and writer Joseph Stefano introduced it in Psycho (in the book by Robert Bloch, as I’ve mentioned before in these pages, Norman Bates was a middle-aged recluse and I’ve long thought Bloch may have based the character on his real-life friend H. P. Lovecraft), and while Lifetime has had its share of old-school pre-Psycho movie psychos, the eye-rolling and snarling villains of both (mainstream) genders, they’ve also done the Nice Young Psycho to death (especially in her perky female incarnation, as witness all those movies they’ve done about wanna-be cheerleaders who are literally willing to kill for that job). This is one of those movies that makes you want to see more of the director’s work – and hope she gets a better script next time!