Dying for a Crown ( Sunshine Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

The next up was Dying for a Crown, ballyhooed as a “Premiere” but to my mind strongly reminiscent of the 2019 Lifetime movie Homekilling Queen and even earlier efforts on the network, since when I wrote about Homekilling Queen and another Lifetime movie aired the same night, Psycho Stripper, I complained, “The sheer predictability of both the titles and the plots they accompany is beginning to wear me down — I’m not sure how much longer I’ll want to watch Lifetime movies.” The film begins with mother Lydia Campbell (Jennifer Titus) driving her daughter Elsie, nicknamed “Elle” (Catharine Daddario) all the way across the country to start her senior year of high school at Troy High in Pensacola, Florida. (The imdb.com page gives the school’s name as “Broyhill” and its location as Los Angeles, but either the original draft of Victoria Rose’s script was set in L.A. and she later moved it to Florida, probably because the Florida-based Sunshine Films was the production company, or Broyhill was the school from which the Campbells are fleeing.) At first we assume they’re just another relatively innocent mother and daughter doing a routine relocation, but we soon learn that Lydia has won a job as vice-principal of Troy under false pretenses (we learn this when the woman who hired her, Alice Evans, played by Laura W. Johnson, can’t find her letter of recommendation in her otherwise excellent job application) and she intends to use her position to install her daughter as both captain of the school’s tennis team and its homecoming queen.

Elle has major competition for both titles – the tennis team is led by Stephanie (Amelia Still) and the odds-on favorite for homecoming queen is Kate Wheeler (Molly Hargrave) – and Elle also accounts a tough Black teacher named Steve Lee (Jevon White) who makes it clear that if Elle continues to miss homework assignments he’ll have her grades downgraded and get her thrown off the tennis team. Lydia is master-planning Elle’s ascent up the social ladder, and one thing she’s doing is using her access to the school’s master computer to tweak her daughter’s grades, so they’re better than they would be under her own merits. As part of Lydia’s master plan to make Elle popular in school even though no one knows her, she sets Elle up with Parker (Andre Haskett) because he’s the star of the school’s basketball team, even though Ben (James Arthur Douglas), who’s taller, beefier and white instead of Black, had a crush on Elle and, since he’s the student body president, one would think he’d be almost as good pickings for Elle as the Black basketball star. (I guess it’s a step forward in race relations that Victoria Rose could assume that dating a Black man would give Elle points in the school’s social pecking order instead of dooming her to outcast status the way it would have 30 years ago.) Lydia also goes out of her way to eliminate her daughter’s chief competitors by planting drugs in their school lockers (she has the master key that opens all of them), and when principal Alice Evans learns that Lydia has imposed a three-week suspension on Kate for drugs when it is well known around the school that Kate never uses, Lydia runs her over with her car. Alice survives but ends up in the hospital, where Lydia goes to smother her with a pillow but fortunately a nurse enters the room in time to stop her, though not in time to see what Lydia was planning to do. Instead Lydia pretends she was merely fluffing the pillow and complaining with crocodile tears that the pillows are so stiff that even if you don’t have a sore neck when you enter the hospital, you’ll surely have one when you leave.

Dying for a Crown was directed by Damien Romay, who was born January 19, 1978 in Buenos Aires, and like Victoria Rose, most of the items on Romay’s list of previous credits seem more Hallmark Channel than Lifetime (though the last two months of every year Lifetime shifts its schedule to incredibly sappy Christmas movies in the Hallmark model and calls it “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime,” which seems to me like a major insult to Frank Capra and his writers). Romay and Rose even steal the marvelous worm-turning ending of Homekilling Queen in which both the bad girls, mother and daughter, are arrested on the night of what’s supposed to be Elle’s big triumph, her coronation as homecoming queen. They twist the knife in a bit by having a foot, whose owner is carefully unseen, step on the cheap white plastic crown used in the ceremony, which fell off Elle’s head when she was taken into custody. The explanation Rose provides for Lydis’s obsession is that years before she was her school’s homecoming queen, and she was dating the big man on campus – only she dumped him to marry Elle’s father, who turned out to be a no-account failure while the guy she’s dumped for him became one of America’s biggest real-estate tycoons and married a trophy wife whom, Lydia says bitterly, spends her days drinking martinis and having plastic surgery. Like Revenge for My Mother, Dying for a Crown is a decently done Lifetime movie but one that sticks close to the formulae and hardly offers anything new.