The Wrong High School Sweetheart (Hyvrid LLC, Lifetime, 2022)

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

The next Lifetime movie was The Wrong High School Sweetheart, which apparently premiered last February on Lifetime’s “streaming” channel, LMN (for “Lifetime Movie Network”) and stars Mea Wilkerson as Danielle Taylor, up-and-coming Black realtor – or is that “Realtor (™)”? – who’s already living with a hunky Black guy named Todd (Doug Rogers) but is getting bored with him because he’s working such late hours he’s hardly ever home. Into this combustible mix comes a youngish white guy Danielle dated 10 years earlier while they were both still in high school, Danny Brooks (Alex Trumble), who was a star baseball player until he destroyed his arm during his freshman year in college, lost his athletic scholarship and has spent the last decade essentially living off remittances from his well-to-do parents who retired to Italy. Danny takes Dani (they used to do a running gag about the similarities of their first names, “Danny and Dani”) to Lincoln High School and leads her to all the spots on campus where they used to make out until the two kiss on the all-purpose room where their high-school prom was held – only on the Big Night Danny got thrown out of the prom for having some drinks outside with his male friends and Dani also got thrown out over guilt by association.

Danny is stuck living in the past, when he was still a sports hero, and I suspect writer Robert Dean Klein was, shall we say, “inspired” by the character of Brick in Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another former sports hero in school whose athletic career was cut short by an injury and has never recovered, either physically or mentally, since. Dani makes the mistake of telling Todd that she kissed Danny – though she insists she didn’t go any farther with him than that – and Todd reacts like the usual jealous, possessive boor of a Lifetime husband whose wife has had, or seems to have had, extra-relational activity. He tells her he’s going to sleep on the couch until further notice. Todd also blows off Dani’s latest appointment with the couples counselor they’ve been seeing, Dr. Susan Lawrence (Tracy Nelson, who looks so much like Hillary Clinton she’d be excellent casting in a biopic of her). Danny shows up at Dr. Lawrence’s office posing as a potential therapist, and just as she’s outside her office leaving a voicemail on Dani’s phone mentioning that a nasty-seeming young man visited her office but she doesn’t say who, Danny runs her down with his car, killing her and leaving a recording of her murder, including her final groan, on Dani’s phone.

Later Danny also kills Jack (Ryan Shoos), an old friend and roommate from Danny’s college days, only before Danny got to Jack, Jack met with Dani and gave her the contact information for Amy (Jamie Bernadette), Danny’s old college girlfriend who had to deal with him coming back into her life, and when she finally threw him out Danny said ominously, “I’ve got another option” – meaning Dani. Eventually Danny kidnaps Todd and holds him somewhere on campus, and his price for letting Dani know where he is is to get that one last dance with her she didn’t get way back when – only the high-school principal, Dee Kressley (Vivica A. Fox, who is also an executive producer and keeps casting herself either as high-school principals or other authority figures that come in at the end and save the day for Our Rather Hapless Heroine), sneaks up behind Danny just as he’s about to kill Dani and either knocks him out or kills him, thereby saving Dani’s life. I briefly feared that writer Klein and veteran Lifetime director David DeCoteau were setting us up for a sequel in which Danny would reappear elsewhere and stalk some other victim with a connection to his past, but no-o-o-o-o,.they blessedly avoided that even though they also left Danny’s fate up in the air. My husband Charles came home from work midway through the movie and was struck by the presence of Eric Roberts in the cast as a good guy – usually of late he’s been playing the crazy stalker, but here he’s Detective Burns (no first name given) of the local police, who investigates Dr. Lawrence’s murder – but overall this movie is nothing special even though it’s a bit better than Wrath, and once again we have the anti-miscegenation message: Our Heroine’s dalliance with a white guy nearly does her in and she’s redeemed by the hunky Black boyfriend with whom she started at the beginning of the movie.