Deadly House Call (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next Lifetime movie was considerably more formulaic in its plotting and, though there wasn’t an imdb.com page, I was able to write down from memory and a screening based on another Web page at least to recall who the three major stars were. It was titled Deadly House Call and it was pretty much a by-the-numbers thriller in which the victim is Ruth Lockhart, long-time wife of investment banker Warren Lockhart (Neville Edwards) – and one thing I’ve said before about these Lifetime movies is at least they show a world in which African-Americans can become well-to-do and have built successful long-term businesses. The protagonist is actually Warren’s daughter Madison (Joanne Jansen), who was being groomed to take over on Warren’s retirement. Warren’s retirement actually occurs considerably ahead of schedule because of the machinations of Our Villainess, Rebecca Wilson (Sierra Woolridge), who not only killed Ruth in the opening scenes, she wangles a job as Warren’s caregiver and feeds him a lot more drugs than he should be on. What’s more, she seduces Warren’s young assistant Gregory and feeds him a hot shot of an extreme tranquilizer that leaves him comatose and near death himself – though my suspicion that the writer or writers will deposit him in the cliché bank and thaw him out again to reveal Rebecca’s villainy was mistaken and Rebecca gets “outed” in another way instead.

There’s another character lurking around Rebecca and at first I think he’s her boyfriend and the two are working a scheme to steal all the Lockhart family money – but instead he turns out to be her younger brother, Jesse Butler (Rebecca’s real name is Jane Butler), and the two of them are from a (Black) family who once had money until they lost it all and they blame Warren Lockhart for that. It turns out their claims are actually justified – Warren embezzled from his clients’ funds and used the loot to make bad investments – but of course, this being a Lifetime movie, any sympathy one might feel towards the Beckers is immediately undercut by their dastardly actions. In the climax Jesse holds a gun on Emmett and their daughter Hailey and threatens to kill them both unless Jane signs a document transferring total control of Lockhart Investments to Jane, who is holding Our Heroine at a deserted lakeside cabin (not another deserted mountain or lakeside cabin!) along with their dad Warren and as soon as she gets Madison’s signature on the document is going to set the place ablaze with a jerry-can of gasoline she has conveniently brought with her.

In the end, though, Madison gets the upper hand on that bitch Jane by grabbing her dad’s ultra-expensive pen and stabbing her with it, which has already been established as an iconic object even before then (there’s been a lot of talk about how Warren signed all his important documents with that pen and Jane a.k.a. “Rebecca” complains how that pen costs more than her car). There have also been some quite kinky scenes in which Jane tries to get the combination of Warren’s safe, which holds the all-important handwritten account ledgers Jane needs to document Warren’s fraud, by posing as Warren’s late wife Ruth and wearing her red dress, silver strands of pearls, and perfume. Deadly House Call cheats a bit on the title – the titular deadly house call occurs during the first act – but for the most part it’s a standard-issue Lifetime would-be thriller whose main deviation from the pattern is the central characters are all Black and therefore it’s the heroine’s white best friend, Nia, who stumbles onto the villainess’s plot but gets killed before she can warn anybody!