Danger Next Door, a.k.a. The Danger Next Door, a.k.a. Terror in the Country (CMW Winter Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I ended up watching a pretty standard-issue Lifetime movie, listed on imdb.com as The Danger Next Door (with a working title given as Terror in the Country) but shown under just Danger Next Door (without the article). Actually that’s not a literally accurate title because the danger the central couple, Robin (Hannah Emily Anderson) and her husband Ben (Jake Epstein) are in comes not from next door but from across the street. When the story starts they’re an upwardly mobile couple in Chicago; she’s an attorney with a big law firm where she’s about to make junior partner, and he’s an aspiring novelist who’s just got a contract for his first book. Then it all gets spoiled one night when a mugger assaults them on the street, gives Ben a life-threatening blow and forces Robin to give him her wedding ring as well as all her other valuables. This freaks both of them out; Robin keeps freaking out whenever she sees anyone on the street who vaguely resembles her mugger (which director Bill Corcoran oddly shoots in a way reminiscent of the marvelous montage in The Gay Divorcée when Fred Astaire, having met Ginger Rogers but then lost track of her, reacts to every woman he sees in the street who even vaguely resembles her – of course, the main difference is in an Astaire-Rogers musical you want him to find her again, and expect him to), and this derails her fast track to promotion at her law firm because every time she tries to return to work, she sees a seedy-looking guy in the street and is intimidated enough to return home and work there.

Ben catches Robin leafing through an issue of Country Life magazine and the two of them decide that the way to save their marriage, their sanity and her ability to give birth to their child in safety and security is to relocate an hour and a half away from the city. They duly find a home in a country community, and in the manner of innumerable previous Lifetime movies on this theme they’re immediately greeted by neighbors Sharon (Kyra Harper) and Guy (David Ferry). The entire story was prefaced by a prologue whose significance only becomes apparent much later: a teenage couple are shown making out in a car and progressing to out-and-out sex – they’re jnot worried about her getting pregnant because she already is – only they notice people from another car are watching them. They frantically try to defrost the windows so they can get away, but no such luck: another car barrels into them and kills them both. At first I thought where the writer (who was listed on the opening credits but isn’t on imdb.com) was going with this was that Guy and Sharon were sort of avenging angels who caught people expressing their sexuality in ways and places they considered inappropriate, and had deliberately rammed their car into that of the young couple, but the connection only becomes apparent several acts later. To continue her legal career while her husband writes his book, Robin has taken a job with a local attorney named Amanda Foster (oddly, imdb.com lists the actress who plays this character’s teenage incarnation in a flashback – Naya Liviah – but not who plays her as an adult; also, Amanda is the only character the writer blessed with a last name).

The moment Amanda was introduced and I saw she was Black, I immediately assumed the writer was setting her up to be The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plan but Is Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine. What I wasn’t expecting is that Amanda is the character who reveals the clue that lets Robin and us know the real motive behind Sharon’s and Guy’s campaign against them – which escalates to them literally letting themselves into Robin’s and Ben’s home any time they feel like it. (Obviously they have keys to the place, which made me wonder why it never occurred to Ben and Robin to have their locks changed.) It turns out that back in their high-school days Amanda was best friends with Sharon’s and Guy’s daughter Riley (Alexandra Floras-Matic, who obviously got the part when the producers decided to upgrade from Alexandra Floras-Manual – joke) until Riley went off the rails and started indulging in alcohol, pills and men. Lots of men, one of whom knocked her up. Those two were the couple we saw in the opening scene necking, and almost fucking, and though the other car that rammed into theirs and killed them was just a random driver, Sharon had driven out in her own car, followed them and intended to confront her daughter Riley and stop her from wrecking her life by running off with her latest boyfriend de jour. So Sharon and Guy had become obsessed with the idea of kidnapping and indefinitely holding another young, pregnant woman the age Riley would be if she’d lived, thereby reproducing their family. Also in the dramatis personae is Robin’s own mother, Carla (Paula Boudreau), who comes to visit them and gets clonged on the head by Sharon with a casserole dish – the film inserted a commercial break just before the blue and when it resumed, the scene was Robin tied up and gagged in Sharon’s and Guy’s basement (a truly hellish environment featuring a doll’s house and racks of rather gruesome-looking home-canned foods).

Naturally she can’t get out – all the windows have been locked or nailed shut and so has the door – and this sets up a series of Lifetime-esque confrontations in which Ben has returned from an out-of-town trip (which provided Sharon and Guy the opening they needed to kidnap Robin), finds his house empty but discovers Carla, knocked unconscious and with her hands bound with duct tape. Ben tells Carla to call 911 and get the police involved (until then we have had no idea how this little town does its law enforcement, and I wondered if it was too small to have its own sheriff’s deputy and they’d have to send to the next town over for police help), though in a goof Charles noted he neglects to undo the bondage, so just how she makes the call is a mystery. Ben goes over but gets stabbed by Guy, who gets Ben’s blood all over his hands and then, like Macbeth, has a crisis of conscience and feels guilty about having nearly killed someone. In the confusion Robin is able to escape the basement and cut through her own duct-tape bondage through a rail on Guy’s and Sharon’s bed, then is able to knock out both of them. The police arrive and in the end Ben and Robin are rescued, though we never find out what happened to Amanda – whether she got to live or suffered at Sharon’s and Guy’s hands the usual fate of the Heroine’s Black Best Friend in a Lifetime movie. Also one of the minor issues of the story is the gender of Robin’s and Ben’s baby – through their connections with the small town’s obstetrician, Sharon and Guy find out it’s going to be a girl before Ben and Robin themselves know (they were going old-school and wanted it to be a surprise). And there are the usual sinister implications that Sharon and Guy had done this before to a couple named Stephens who formerly occupied That House.

The ending was a bit of a surprise – I had thought Ben and Robin would move back to Chicago, deciding that muggers were less of a threat than psycho country neighbors, but instead they’re comfortably ensconced on the front porch of their country home and it’s the former home of Sharon and Guy that has the “For Sale” sign out front. Danger Next Door is pieced together, Frankenstein monster-style, from bits and pieces of other (and mostly better) Lifetime movies, and while director Corcoran sporadically attempts to make it into a Gothic horror piece he’s really not very good at that sort of thing – and after the strong and incisive performances in The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story it was disappointing to see acting in a Lifetime movie revert to its usual level of slovenliness.