Fatal Fandom (The Ninth House, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Alas, the second “premiere” film on Lifetime’s schedule, Fatal Fandom, was nowhere nearly as good. It was written and directed by old Lifetime hand Jake Helgren, whose résumé includes a lot of treacly-titled Christmas movies as well as the other sort of Lifetime fare – the kind I’m more interested in. I did a search on moviemagg.blogspot.com to learn which Jake Helgren movies I’ve already written about and found Suicide Note (2016), Deadly Matrimony a.k.a. Vows of Deceit (2018), Psycho Party Planner (2020), Psycho Sister-in-Law (2020), The Good Nanny (2017), Psycho Stripper (2019), The Perfect Mother (2018), Nightmare Nurse (2016 – though that time Helgren was just the writer and Craig Moss directed), Babysitter’s Nightmare (2018), and Killer Dream Home (2020).

Fatal Fandom – originally shot under the working title The Bodyguard until people realized that would provoke comparisons between this film and the 1993 The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, a lousy film but a world-beating masterpiece compared witn this one. The central character is superstar dance diva Eden Chase (Chaley Rose), who is mysteriously the victim of an attempted kidnapping as she leaves the recording studio one night and is saved by the security guard on the lot, Jackson Reed (Pete Ploszek). From then on, as Eden moves Jackson into her home and Jackson responds by sneaking around, fondling one of Eden’s bras (after she’s already told both him and us that she doesn’t like other people even touching her clothes), spying on her as she takes a shower, and finally making a pass at her one night (which she appears to be yielding to – the sight of Pete Ploszek’s jeans-clad ass grinding against Chaley Rose’s bikini-wearing cunt was singularly appealing – until she suddenly decides she doesn’t want the help screwing her and decides to go to bed alone).

While all this is going on Eden is also getting ready to re-record a song from her first album, “Reborn,” even though it’s for a film involving her ex-husband, Lee Vance (Patrick McLain) and she’s not exactly thrilled with the idea of doing a track to help out an ex she dumped when she caught him having extra-relational activities. We see Jackson slipping his hand down the back of Ozzie (Ian Patrick Williams), a middle-aged white guy who’s produced all her records, and Jackson hides out in his car until Ozzie gets in and Jackson strangles him. Later Jackson murders Eden’s long-time manager Colette (Malaya Rivera Drew) and uses her phone to send a text message inviting Lee to a private party at Eden’s Beverly Hills home to celebrate the release of the redone track of “Reborn.” Naturally Jackson clubs Lee to death and also clobbers Eden’s replacement boyfriend, Christian Cruz (Bayardo De Murguia), though Christian survives and pairs back up with Eden at the end. It seems that Christian was a fellow musician and the only reason they stopped seeing each other is they would never get their work schedules to be free at the same time – and it didn’t help that she was making way more money than he was. (Earlier in the movie Eden does to Christian what she does to Jackson later on: she gets him all hot and bothered and looks ready to have sex with himn when she suddenly changes hher mind and sends him away with a bad case of blue balls.) In the meantime Eden’s lifelong friend Addison Bright (Heather Morris) admits to her that she was one of the women Lee Vance had extra-relatonal activities with when Lee and Eden were still married.

Writer-director Helgren deserves points for casting Chaley Rose, an actress who can really sing, as Eden – he didn’t drag in a voice double (ironically Lifetime showed this movie right after Fallen Angels Book Club: Friends to Die For starring Toni Braxton, who had her first fame as a singer but didn’t get to sing in it at all) or cast a non-singing star who would need one. Rose is best known for playing a singer in the TV series Nashville, and as Eden she is quite good both as an actress and a singer (unlike – dare I say it? – Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard). Helgren also deserves points for an unusual motivation for Jackson’s character; it seems through most of the movie that he has a sick obsession with Eden’s body and with making her his lover whether she wants him “that way” or not. Instead Helgren pulls a trick he’s used in some of his earlier films but it’s still a legitimate variation on the usual Lifetime formula: Jackson had a younger sister who never recovered from the departure of their dad when their mom got pregnant with her, and when mom died of a rare disease at 26 Jackson had to be his sister’s parent.

He watched as his sister developed an obsession with Eden Chase in general and the song “Reborn” in particular, thinking that she could kill herself and then be “reborn” the way Eden talked about in the song (which she had actually meant her own recovery after getting out of the abusive relationship with Lee Vance), and when instead his sister killed herself and did not come back to life Jackson decided to worm his way into her life, first hiring a crazed fan to “kidnap” her (Eden finds him, tied up but still alive, in a disused closet in her home), then getting himself hired as her bodyguard and knocking off her closest associates before finally killing her. Only Eden repels his final assault by using a martial-arts move he’d previously taught her – ah, the irony! – and the film ends more or less happily despite Jackson’s boast that he’s really ruined her career because no one will want to hear “Reborn” again after all the bodies it’s left in its wake.