The Wrong Blind Date (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Alas, the second movie, The Wrong Bliind Date, was considerably weaker and followed all the Lifetime clichés without putting a creative spin on them the way Greed did. It was yet another “Wrong … “ story produced by and starring Vivica A. Fox (this time playing a psychiatrist instead of a school principal, though still having to deal with a shocking level of emotional immaturity among her charges), directed by David DeCoteau and with a story by Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, though the actual script was by one Lark Bunker, an otherwise unknown writer to me. (So far The Wrong Blind Date is his or her first and only credit on imdb.com. This time the story is set in Hollywood and the central character is Laura Reynolds (Meredith Thomas), a nice, pert, attractive blonde woman but one who’s clearly just started to lose her looks; she’s still reasonably hot but one can tell the beginnings of “worry lines” on her face. She’s in the middle of a separation from her second husband, Michael Reynolds (Clark Moore), a police detective (he’s insistent on being called that and not just an “officer”) and a controlling bastard at home with Laura. Michael so dotes on Laura’s daughter Hannah (Sofia Masson) that for a while I thought the writers were heading for Lolita territory here, but no such luck. Instead Hannah is only Michael’s stepdaughter – her biological dad, Laura’s first husband, died when Hannah was eight – though that hasn’t stopped Michael from raising her as a “daddy’s girl.” On the incredibly terrible advice of psychiatrist Beth (Vivica A. Fox), Laura logs on to an Internet dating site (one of the things I am grateful for my marriage is that neither Charles nor I have had to deal with the hazards of Internet dating, and hopefully we never will) and gets a response even though she deletes her account after it’s been up just six hours.

The response is from a man who calls himself Kevin Holmes (Matthew Pohlkamp), claims to be a venture capitalist with a home in Beverly Hills, and has the same tastes in books and movies as Laura. An online promo on LIfetime’s Web site dropped a big hint that Kevin was actually wooing Laura as part of a plot hatched by her ex-husband Michael (when the story starts they are legally separated but not yet divorced, and Michael has a penchant for dropping in as if he owned the place, then answers her complaints with the reminder that he’s paying the mortgage on it and therefore in a manner of speaking he does own it) to win her back by scaring her away from dating other men. It turns out that Michael has not only hired “Kevin” to go after his wife but briefed him on her tastes so he can come off as a perfect match for her. Laura is partners in a design firm with Angela (Lesli Kay), who’s sort of the Voice of Reason in all this, and “Kevin” offers to set up a golf match with one of his investment clients to get her more accounts – only the person she’s supposed to play with is out of the country for two months and never plays golf anyway. Though Angela is white, it seems as if she’s being set up for the usually African-American role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Figures Out the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Reveal It.

Laura’s daughter Hannah and Hannah’s boyfriend Noah (Rainer Dawn, a great-looking young man with a penchant for going topless and showing off his hot set of pecs; he looks like he stepped out of a porn video) start revealing “Kevin’s” multiple mysteries and ultimately learn that he’s really an ex-con called Stephen Johnson, who was arrested way back when by Michael Reynolds, who paid Stephen to go after his wife – only Stephen fell genuinely in love with Laura and tried to renege on the deal. First Stephen murders Jason (Peter Daniel Adams, a close second to Rainer Dawn for the hottest guy in the film), a bartender who recognizes him from “the joint” and threatens to blackmail him. Then Stephen overpowers Michael and leaves him near death – though he’s rescued. Stephen then entraps Noah by cloning Hannah’s phone (he does this just by pointing his phone at hers and hitting a button, which Charles said is impossible; you can only clone someone’s phone if there’s an electrical contact between each phone) and sending a text for him to meet “her,” then stabbing Noah with a knife – though, like Michael, Noah is left alive at the end. A “teaser” shot at the beginning shows how this story is going to end: Stephen has left both Laura and Hannah gagged (and presumably bound) on their couch, but Our Intrepid Therapist has let herself into the Reynolds’ home and grabs a wrench or something, hits Stephen over the head with it, knocks him out and then says Vivica A. Fox’s classic bad line, “You went on the wrong blind date.” (She seems to end every Lifetime “Wrong … “ movie with some variation on this line.)

Not only is The Wrong Blind Date a virtual compendium of LIfetime clichés, its casting directors, Jan Glaser and Nancy McManus, screwed up by making all the men in it look very much alike. There’s surprisingly little physical difference between Clark Moore, Matthew Pohlkamp and Peter Daniel Adams, and even Rainer Dawn looks like he’s going to grow up into that “type” in 20 years or so. All this makes for a highly confusing movie in which in many scenes, until director DeCoteau and his cinematographer (surprisingly unidentified on imbd.com, although the “first assistant camera,” Ben Stevenson, is!) move in for a close-up it’s not easy to tell which man is whom. The worst thing about The Wrong Blind Date is the feeling we get that we’ve seen it all before; as the familiar plot clichés troop out on screen and we stay two or three acts ahead of the director at all times (when he re-watched the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon in the early 1960’s Dwight Macdonald praised it by saying, “How nice it is to be behind the director instead of two or three reels ahead of him!”), we start to wonder, “Why are we watching this? We’ve seen it already,” even as we know we haven’t.