The Lost Girls, a.k.a. Angie: Lost Girls (Freestyle Digital Media, Artists for Change Productions.Lifetime, 2020)

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

After Caught in His Web Lifetime showed its “Premiere” movie of the weekend, actually a two-year-old movie called The Lost Girls. This was difficult to find since imdb.com doesn’t have a listing for it – they have a listing for a 2022 film called The Lost Girls, but it’s a fantasy offshoot of Peter Pan described as follows: “Like her grandmother and her mother Jane before her, Wendy must escape Pan's hold on her and the promise he wants her to keep.” The stars of that The Lost Girls are Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson and Iain Glen, and it was written and directed by Livia de Paolis based on a novel by Laurie Fox. This The Lost Girls is directed by Julia Verdin from a script co-written by herself and Janet Odogwu, and it’s listed on imdb.com under the title Angie: Lost Girls, though another Web site, https://bestmoviecast.com/the-lost-girls-2022-cast-release-date-plot-trailer/, gave the full cast and crew list.

Angie Morgan (Jane Widdop) is a teenager, alienated first by her parents Dan (Randall Batinkoff) and Hayley (Olivia d’Abo, the closest this film has to a “name” star) moving her from the “West Adams” neighborhood where she had friends and a social life to Los Angeles, where she feels lonely and desperate. She drifts into an affair with a young man named Mario (Dylan Sprayberry) who woos her with boyish charm. Of course she has no idea he’s really a recruiter for a gang of human traffickers led by Deacon (Marty Dew) and Ida (Denise Nicholson), a truly formidable and nasty woman who, though writers Verdin and Odogwu don’t spell this out for us, probably was a human trafficking victim herself who rose through the ranks and ultimately became the gang’s madam and enforcer. (That’s what real recovering trafficking victims and the brave volunteers who help them have told me in public presentations and interviews.)

The breaking point comes when Angie’s parents fail to show up at her recital where, as part of a program involving her fellow students, she plays ukulele and sings several songs. (The first song we hear Angie sing is “House of the Rising Sun,” a traditional folk blues about a woman forced into a life of prostitution. I’m sure Verdin and Odogwu deliberately picked that song because later that will be Angie’s fate as well.) Mario comes up and offers to drive her home, but first he wants to take her to meet his uncle, who he says is a music producer and promoter who can help launch her career as a professional singer. Of course we know he’s lying, not just because we’ve already seen the promos and therefore we know what the movie is about, but because Jane Widdop’s voice is scratchy, harsh and not exactly the stuff of which professional singing careers are made. Angie, renamed “Angel” by the gang, soon learns the truth and suffers several beatings before she yields to the inevitable and starts turning tricks for the gang, and many of the men she has to have sex with get off on beating her up.

She makes friends with two women in the same predicament, Zoë (Lindsey De Sylveira) and Latisha (Rita Rucker), both Black. Zoë gives Angie a beaded bracelet that was made for her by a woman who tried to get her out of The Life, and later on when Angie makes her own escape the volunteer anti-trafficking activist who helped both women recognizes the bracelet and tells Angie of its origins. Until the mid-point the film cuts back and forth between Angie’s ordeal at the hands of the traffickers and the ordeal of her parents and her younger sister Maddie (Juliette Hanover), who miss her. Among the people who show up to the home of Angie’s parents are a Black detective who looks a lot like one of the people in the trafficking ring – lending credence to Ida’s statement, “Don’t bother going to the police, because they’re on our payroll.” (This too is quite common among trafficking gangs: often they pay off the local police either in cash or in “freebies.”) Angie is put in a safe house and given a new phone whose number only the police, her parents and Rachel (Cherie Jiminez), the volunteer who’s helping her, are supposed to have the number.

But the traffickers find her anyway, after storming into a group therapy session and taking out Latisha, whom they kill almost immediately to intimidate Angie into returning; and then calling Angie directly after they get her number from a fellow trafficking victim who showed up for what was supposed to be a janitorial job. She brought her one-year-old baby because she couldn’t afford a sitter or anyone else to leave her with, and the traffickers threatened either to sell the child into human slavery or just kill her if her mom didn’t cooperate. Angie returns to the clutches of the traffickers, thinking she has to do so or they will kill her sister Maddie, and the cops and Rachel have to trace her again, which they do surprisingly quickly. Though the film has its flaws and overall isn’t as coherent a piece of work as Caught in His Web, The Lost Girls gets better as it progresses and is especially strong in depicting the Mother of All Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders Angie is going through once she’s been rescued. Indeed, I wondered why in the entire movie no one suggested she undergo therapy for PTSD, but instead tne Verdin-Odogwu script explains that the sort of help she really needs can only come from other human trafficking victims who can relate to her on a victim-to-victim level.

The Lost Girls was followed by a 15-minute mini-documentary which featured interviews with two people: José Lewis Alfaro, who was thrown out of his home by his parents for refusing to go through “conversion therapy” because he was Gay and went on a chat board that was really run by traffickers; and Toni D. Rivera, a middle-aged Black woman who was also a trafficking victim (though she offers herself as an example of how you can make it through the experience; she proclaims herself married and with five children, so having been trafficked did not screw up her ability to have a normal, loving relationship) and – though she didn’t mention this in the Lifetime interview – also a trafficker herself until, as reporter Terry Shropshire reported in an online article on July 4, 2020 (https://rollingout.com/2020/07/04/former-sex-slave-toni-d-rivera-now-saves-kids-from-sex-traffricking-trade/), “her daughter had [been] very nearly victimized the way she was. While riding the 6-train in New York one day, a known trafficker tried to snatch her daughter off of a packed subway and no one tried to step in to help her.” As I’ve noted before about previous Lifetime movies about human trafficking and other forms of child abuse, including the 2006 film For the Love of a Child about the founding of Childhelp International, movies like this make you think that virtually the entire human race is pond scum for allowing these things to happen – but also that there are some redeeming people who actually try their damnedest to help fight these evils.