Hall Pass Nightmare (Hybrid LLC, Mayor Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Lifetime’s third movie of the night was something called Hall Pass Nightmare, and since it immediately followed a movie set in high school I assumed the title was a reference to hall passes students get if they needed to use the bathroom during a class. Instead it’s a reference to organized extra-relational activities indulged in by youngish married women who, with their husbands’ permission, can have one extra-marital fling a year with a man of their choice. The central characters are Carrie Palmer (Andrea Bowen), her husband Justin (Gil Gerard, tall and heavy-set instead of lanky like most actors who play innocent husbands in Lifetime), and Dante Jones (Matt Magnusson), a former rock star who 20 years ago led a major band called Icarus. Now he tours as a solo artist, playing acoustic guitar and singing, and his long-suffering manager Quinn (Alan Pietruszewski) is trying to explain to him that he no longer has the drawing power for stadium tours, and he needs either to go out with oter artists on the bill or to re-form Icarus for a reunion tour. Dante, whose real name is Thomas Murphy, rejects both those alternatives out of hand. While out of town on a medical convention – both Carrie and Justin work in health care, he as a salesperson for medical devices and she as some sort of insurance consultant – Carrie hears her friends and co-workers Lexi (April Nelson) and Beth (Ciarra Carter) talking about this “hall pass” stuff.

Lexi is single and determined to stay that way, but Beth’s husband gave her a “hall pass” already and she encourages Carrie to go for it with Dante Jones, who by sheer coincidence (or authorial fiat by Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, longtime Lifetime hands; Schenck and Sullivan get co-credit for the “original” story and Sullivan alone for the script) is staying at the same hotel. Dante picks up Carrie at the hotel bar and persuades her to come up to his room, where he starts making out with her. It gets as far as mutual kissing before Carrie’s wedding rnig falls off her finger, though instead of signaling her willingness to go through with a trick with the hot rock star she’s had a crush on since she was in high school and his band Icarus was at the peak of its popularity, it actually symbolizes a timely reminder that she has a husband back home even though they haven’t had sex together in months. (Their mutual excuse is they’re both so busy they’re too tired to muster up the energy when they get home.) For some reason Dante has formed an intense crush on her and decided she is the one, the only woman who truly understands him and the woman he needs to be with. Later we learn that he went through this sort of thing before with a woman named Brenda (Kacy Owens), whom he also obsessed over and stalked until he made her life totally miserable. Showing the kinds of super-powers typical of Lifetime villains, Dante literally breaks into Carrie’s home (he picks her locks) and seems to have bugged her place so he knows exactly what she’s doing moment by moment.

Two-thirds of the way through the movie Carrie files a complaint with the police – Schenck and Sullivan seem to have inserted this sequence mainly to answer the question a lot of Lifetime viewers have about their movies, which is why the put-upon heroines never go to the police – only Dante is able to snow the police in general and Black woman detective Lee (Maya Goodwin) in particular that he ends up with a restraining order against her. My husband Charles gave the film, and in particular its casting directors, Dean E. Fronk and Donald Paul Pemrick, for finding an actor to play Dante who was still quite attractive but looked like someone who would have been considerably hotter a decade or so ago. The film ends ambiguously with a scene in which Carrie is taking a bath in a candle-ringed tub (bathing in a candle-surrounded tub has become an odd movie cliché at least since the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born in 1976) when Dante surreptitiously enters her home and it looks like she’s going to be a sitting duck for him. Only she manages to get out of the bathtub in time and confront him with a golf club, finally knocking him down a flight of stairs – the film started with a prologue in which he’s wearing a ski mask and chasing her through her kitchen with a knife, but if such a scene materialized during the climax I missed it – and the end shows Carrie and Justin, who left her but luckily came back as a badly needed reinforcement during the final confrontation, reconciling and going off in a vacation together from which they intend to return with a baby on the way.

Dante’s fate remains unspecified; we don’t know whether he’s killed in the fall, he’s arrested or he escapes in case Schenck, Sullivan and director Maria Sokoloff (mostly an actress, though she has five other directorial credits on imdb.com even though most of them are for TV-movies or shorts) want to bring him back for a sequel. Like the other two movies on Lifetime’s schedule last night, Hall Pass Nightmare is a formula piece with little or nothing to distinguish it from the common run of Lifetime movies, though it was at least entertaining and Matt Magnusson was hot enough he was fun to watch on, shall we say, aesthetic grounds alone.