by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 Lifetime aired another “premiere” of something called The Podcast Murders, and if the two previous Lifetime “premieres” had been at opposite ends of the quality scale – Let’s Get Physical was considerably better than average and Swindler Seduction quite a bit worse – The Podcast Murders was about average, though it was weighted down by a truly terrible “twist” ending (more on that later). It’s about a series of killings in a typically generic American small town (though, as ini so many Lifetime movies, America was “played” by Canada: in this case, Kamloops in British Columbia) that’s been going on for at least two years. The police have more or less dropped any active investigation and let the trail go cold, and unto the breach stepped intrepid podcaster Chloe Joy (Lanie McAuley), who had launched a podcast about the killings to goad the police into doing more to solve them. Chloe has carefully covered her own trail because she wants to keep the podcast anonymous, but she’s called by a reporter named Ellie Manchester (Natalie Sharp) who says she works for a lifestyle magazine. Ellie tells Chloe her magazine is going to do a story about her whether she cooperates or not, and if she agrees to be interviewed Chloe will get a substantial paycheck as well as some control over how the story is written. Chloe is also approached by a young man named Josh Rogers (Clayton James, who as Clayton Chitty played Britney Spears’ husband Kevin Federline in a decidedly unauthorized Lifetime biopic called Britney Ever After) who works out at the same gym she does. The two start dating and it’s touch and go whether Chloe can balance her new best friend with her new boyfriend. She continues to investigate the case and visits the house where the most recent killing, that of Lucy Miller (Jennifer Proce), took place.
The film actually opened with a sequence showing Lucy’s murder – she was lured to a house for sale in a remote location and the killer ambushed her there and knocked oer off – and the scene then cut to Chloe narrating the story on her podcast. To get inside the house, Chloe has to deal with the real-estate agent, a heavy-set man who looks vaguely Black (though the one actor on the cast list who might be playing him is named David Fung, so it’s possible he’s at least part-Asian even though Fung’s imdb.com page contains no photo, so I can’t check his appearance with what I saw in the film). She goes there twice, and the second time around he pleads with her for money and she says she won’t be blackmailed, though it’s left ambiguous as to what he could be blackmailing her about. Chloe and Josh go on several dates until he tells her that his job as an advertising representative will require him to take a week-long out-of-town trip. Chloe tries to call and text him several times and Josh’s phone goes to voicemail and he ignores her texts. We’ve also seen a mysterious series of phone calls between Josh and Ellie, and we start to wonder if Josh is the mystery killer and Ellie is covering for him in an elaborate scheme to find out how much Chloe knows. Only at the end, a climax taking place in a disused winery that’s been foreclosed on, it turns out [big-time spoiler alert!] that Chloe herself is the killer. Her would-be boyfriend “Josh” is in fact Jack Hansen, brother of the killer’s first victim, Meghan Hansen (Carolyn Yonge), whom Chloe knew in college and befriended until Meghan went after a man Chloe was interested in and grabbed him for herself. Chloe never forgave her and killed her, then picked off three other women, Emma Jacobs (Sydney Hendricks), Amber Swanson (Shanelle Connell), and Lucy Miller. Chloe killed these young, pert blonde women because they had either dumped her as a friend to be with people who were more “in” or moved in on a man in whom Chloe was interested. Ellie was Jack’s fiancée and she agreed to be part of his plot to expose Chloe by befriending her, then letting Jack seduce Chloe, then making a big public display of affection for Jack in Chloe’s sight so Chloe would think, “Ah, I’m being dumped again,” and try to kill Ellie – only she and Jack would alert the police so as soon as they recorded Chloe’s confession, the cops could arrest her.
The trick ending reminded me of director Fritz Lang’s last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), which stars Dana Andrews as a reporter who decides to frame himself for murder to show how easy it is to convict somene on circumstantial evidence and send him to the electric chair – only Lang’s producer, Bert Friedlob, forced him to shoot a trick ending in which Andrews’ character really did kill the victim. Lang protested; as he told Friedlob in a conversation he later recalled to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse, “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one hour and thirty-eight minutes and then in the last minute reveal that he’s a son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is just a joke.” To their credit, the makers of The Podcast Murders, director Alex Caulfiend and writer Ken Miyamoto, did drop a few clues and played at least a bit more fairly with their audience than Friedlob and his writer, Douglas Morrow, did. In addition to the odd blackmail scene between Chloe and the realtor, they had Chloe stress in her podcast that while the victims had been tortured and killed, they had not been raped – which would lead us to wonder if the killer was a woman.
They also left a contradiction in Chloe’s story – throughout the film she says that the reason she started the podcast is that she was a survivor of an abusive boyfriend (which she wasn’t, though in several scenes we see Chloe having nightmares that flash her back to being abused), and the experience forced her to drop out of college. Later she tells Josh that the money she’s making from her podcast helped to pay off her student loans. They may not be inconsistent – it’s possible Chloe (or, to use her true mane, Rebecca Wagner) had run up a major student loan tab before she dropped out – but one thing writer Miyamoto keeps ambiguous is how Chloe makes her living aside from the money from the podcast. In fact, early on I started wondering, “Maybe they’re going to have Chloe turn out to be the killer,” though I didn’t really think that Miyamoto and Caulfield would go there. That still leaves open the question of why she started the podcast in the first place when it was building public interest in a series of murders the police had pretty much given up on solving. It reminded me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s late Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” in which Holmes realizes that his client, Josiah Amberley, really killed his wife and her lover and tried to blame it on an unknown stranger. When Watson asks Holmes why Amberley would hire him to solve two murders he had committed himself, Holmes says, “Pure cheek! He wanted to be able to say, ‘I have called not only the police but even Sherlock Holmes.’” The Podcast Murders is probably a better movie than I’m giving it credit for, but I’m so irritated by the ending it’s a film that’s very hard to endorse, let alone actually like.
