12 Desperate Hours (Best on Best, Allegheny Image Factory, Lifetimew, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 25) I watched a much-hyped “premiere” movie pmn Lifetime called 12 Deperate Hours – the numeral is part of the official title – based on the story “Last Dance, Last Chance” by the late true-cime writer Ann Rule. For some reason Rule changed the names of the protagonists of her story – the villain, originally Gary Lee Quinlivan, to “Denny Tuohmy” (Harrison Thomas), and his principal victim – the suburban housewife he kidnaps and forces to drive him to different locations around the town of Kent in Washington state – was really Patricia Jacque but Rule called her “Val Jane.” Also, either she or Lifetime’s writers,Conor Allyn and Benjamin Anderson, updated the story from December 1963 (the time the real crimes occurred) to the present. The film was directed by Gina Gershon, who made a literally explosive film debut as a predatory Bisexual Las Vegas chorus dancer in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Gershon turns out to be a marvelous director with a real flair for suspense and action, and under her guidance Harrison Thomas gives an excellent performance. What in other hands (both actor and director) could have all too easily turned into just another Lifetime psychopath becomes a rich, varied and pathos-inducing character.

When we first see Denny he’s already killed an acquaintance – though Val doesn’t know that – and he holds her at gunpoint with a sawed-off shotgun and takes her hostage, forcing her to drive him. She’s a put-upon wife with two sons whose safety she understandably fears for and a husband who’s a construction worker and is too busy on his job to sped the “date night” she was hoping for. She’s also bought him a watch for Christmas – the story takes place on December 21 and there’s enough “Christmasicity” in the story to qualify this as a Christmas movie even though it wouldn’t have fit into Lifetime’s actual holiday season programming (basically Lifetime copying the Hallmark Chanel’s romance formula for November and December – even though he thought they had agreed not to buy each other presents because they’re still under water financially. Once Denny enters we quickly learn that he grew up in foster homes and just broke up with a girlfriend named Cherie (Tali Rabinowitz), who works in a nursing home and has instructed the Black woman who runs the front desk to tell Denny she’s gone home even when she hasn’t. In the film’s most chilling scene, Denny uses hos shotgun to blow away Cherie’s mother, and Cherie comes over to see her and discovers her corpse in the kitchen.

Val tries to reason with Denny as much as possible and Denny tells her of the trip he and Cherie took to Pismo Beach, California for what appears to be the happiest time of Denny’s life. Eventually Val drives Denny to the home of his foster brother, whom he wants to borrow a car from, only the brother cruelly taunts Denn, first waving the keys to the car in his face and then snatching them away. The brother’s wife hates Denny even more than her husband does, and when the brother gives Denny $5 she bitterly says that’;s $5 more than he’s worth. Denny returns to Val’s car and says she can leave him there and go home now, but Val doesn’t because she knows as soon as she leaves Denny is going to go back into his brother’s place and kill him, his wife and their kid. Instead Val drives Denny out again until the police, alerted by Val’s husband Mark (genuinely hot-looking David Conrad),ambush them and arrest Denny. 12 Desperate Hours – like A Rose for Her Grave,last week’s Lifetime “premiere” also based on a true-crime story by Ann Rule – is one of the better recent movies on this problematic but occasionally brilliant channel, very much worth watching and hopefully heralding the advent of yet another woman director who’s got an opportunity on Lifetime to show her stuff and hopefully advance to theatrical features (we hope!).