Revenge for My Mother (Shadowboxer LLC, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night my husband Charles came home from work early so we could have dinner together, and I had seen a program of three Lifetime movies, none of which I had seen before, that I wanted to watch from 6 p.m. to midnight. They were called Revenge for My Mother, Dying for a Crown and Hall Pass Nightmare, and they were all quite formulaic and strongly reminiscent of stories Lifetime had done before. Revenge for My Mother was produced by Shadowboxer Films and the Johnson Produciton Group and directed by Doug Campbell, a familiar name on Lifetime credits – though the writer, Barbara Arsenault, has no other credits on imdb.com. It deals with Audrey Bates (Sami Nye), a woman who’s been living with partner Matt Conroy (Jason Tobias, the kind of lanky, sandy-haired actor Lifetime likes to cast as the innocent put-upon husband) for 10 years without marrying him. Audrey has built a flourishing business called Stroller Moms, which teaches yoga to women who’ve recently had babies – as you might expect, the class sessions are ringed with strollers containing the babies the students have just given birth to – and Matt has been running the business end until now. But the business has grown so much that he can’t handle it and still pursue his aspirations for novel writing, so Audrey decides to hore an assistant. Unfortunately, the assistant she hires is Brooklyn Hart (Taylor Joree Scorse), who in the opening scenes of the movie we saw just getting released from prison after serving a year and a half. Director Campbell gives us a good view of her heavily tattooed back as she doffs the orange jumpsuit and puts on normal street clothes.

She’s met there by her father, Gavin S. Wolf (Bobby Marchesso), who takes her home to his place but lays down the law to her: he’s not going to support her. She can live rent-free at his place but she needs to find a job to pay for food and all her other expenses. Brooklyn looks online and sees Audrey’s ad looking for an executive assistant, only the moment her dad looks at Audrey’s Web site he has a heart attack. On his deathbed he reveals to his daughter that her mother did not die of breast cancer, as he’d previously told her; instead she was killed when she was run over by a car – and the driver was, you guessed it, Audrey Bates. Brooklyn takes her dad to the emergency room, where she’s told they can save his life with an operation, only his arteries were even more blocked than the doctors thought they were at first, and he dies. The successive shocks of learning her mom was the victim of vehicular manslaughter, that Audrey used her family’s connections to draw six months’ probation and community service instead of jail time, and losing her father so suddenly totally unhinge Brooklyn and lead her to vow revenge. She hatches a plan to destroy Audrey’s life systematically, and the first step in her plan is not to seduce Matt (as I had figured she would, given that’s how most previous Lifetime movies on this subject have worked), but to make it look like Matt is after her. She even pulls the old trick of hitting herself in the head with a door and then telling the cops that Matt beat her up when she wouldn’t have sex with him.

Matt duly gets arrested for the nonexistent “crime” and spends the rest of the movie in jail awaiting trial. Then Brooklyn orders a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes and “accidentally” stabs Audrey in the foot with one, causing her to call off his classes temporarily – only Brooklyn puts out a series of e-mails making it seem like she’s closed the business permanently. Audrey’s lifelong friend Jane Miller (Janet Carter) figures out Brooklyn’s plot and realizes who she really is – the daughter of the woman Audrey killed all those years ago – but, though she’s not Black (though Barbara Arsenault gives at least hints that she’s a Lesbian when Jane expresses her distaste for men in general), she ends up fulfilling the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Learns of the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her. Jane attempts to call Audrey to warn her against Brooklyn, but Audrey never gets the calls because Brooklyn has locked her phone in a secure file drawer and taken the key herself. Brooklyn clobbers Jane with the box containing her dad’s ashes (offhand it’s the first time I can recall seeing cremains as a murder weapon) and then goes after the most prized possession in Audrey’s life: Zoë, the baby girl she and Matt (ya remember Matt?) had together. Brooklyn leaves half-empty bottles of cheap booze and packs of cigarettes (the brand Audrey used to smoke before she quit on Matt’s request) and sets fire to the baby stroller containing Zoë.

At first we think she’s killed the baby – even for a Lifetime movie, that’s pretty weird and strong – while Audrey was too drugged out (courtesy of the rohypnol with which Brooklyn has been spiking her smoothies) to stop her. Later, though, it turns out Zoë is alive after all – Brooklyn left her in Audrey’s living room – though a nasty officer from Child Protective Services named Rebecca Peters (Anzu Lawson) shows up with a court order to take Zoë and put her in foster care. Brooklyn steals Audrey’s car and kidnaps Zoë from the foster mother, and then lures Audrey to the park where she taught her yoga classes and tells Audrey either deliberately to take an overdose of sleeping pills, which will kill her amd make it look like suicide, or she will use her switchblade knife to murder Zoë while she makes Audrey watch. Fortunately Audrey is able to get the upper hand, though there’s a preposterous chase scene in which Audrey is not only running away from Brooklyn (whose real name, we’ve learned, is Elizabeth Ann Wolf – maybe Barbara Arsenault deliberately took the name from Warren G. Harding’s illegitimate daughter, but more likely not) but running after Zoë to catch her runaway baby carriage before it rolls into the street and a car hits her. The movie ends happily, with Audrey and Matt reconciled, Zoë safe at home with both her parents, and the Stroller Moms business rebuilt. Revenge for My Mother was an O.K. Lifetime movie, serviceable and with a few intriguing diversions from the usual formulae, but it’s not all that interesting and Arsenault wasn’t able to give Brooklyn the moral complexity Christine Conradt has given her Lifetiem villainesses.