Stranger Next Door (Je'Caryous Entertainment, One Represent, Red Zeppelin Productions, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 5) I watched a dull, boring, thoroughly pointless Lifetime movie that was as wretched as the “premiere” the night before, Black Girl Missing, was exceptional. It was called Stranger Next Door and was also billed as a “premiere,” though the date listed on the imdb.com page for it was 2022, not 2023. (According to a trailer ini the film’s imb.com page, it was originally shown on July 10, 2022 on a channel called One Represent.) It was directed byVictoria Rowell and written by Camara Davis, and normally I give kudos to Lifetime for giving opportunities to women filmmakers – some of whom, like Christine Conradt, Vanessa Parise and Gina Gershon, have thoroughly deserved them – I would hope that the names of Ms. Rowell and Ms. Davis never darken the credits of a Lifetime movie (or anyone else’s) ever again. I’d been attracted to Stranger Next Door mainly because of the sheer drop-dead gorgeous hunkiness of the actor in the title role, Skyh Alvester Black. His imdb.com page says he’s been a dancer for such African-American divas as Beyoncé, Riuhanna and Mariah Carey, and he’s starring in a series of dramas produced by Tyler Perry that cast him as a Black male exotic dancer (i.e., stripper). He certainly has the body for it, and it would be nice to see him playing something other than a black-hearted villain, which of course is how Lifetime cast him. (Though there have been a few exceptions, for the most part genuinely sexy men in Lifetime movies turn out to be particularly nasty bad guys.)

Stranger Next Door adds to the growing number of Lifetime movies in which all hte principals, or most of them, are Black, not only the villain but also his principal victim, Rochelle Sellers (Vicky Jeudy). She plays an ex-cop in a community in Tennessee we’re not given the name of the city and only a wall sign lets us know the name of the state – who was investigating a drug gang when she found out her then-husband Michael was taking payoffs from the cartel leader. She ratted him out to the FBI and the result was that she got bounced off the force and forced into retirement, where she works from home as a computer security consultant. Her best friends are Terry Ensley (Angela Davis – no, not the same one), a Black fellow cop who’s worried because Rochelle’s pleadings for help running license plates and other ID’s might get her in trouble, or even fired, because the higher-ups on the force are still lo9yal to Michael; and Keele, pronounced “Keeley” (Tyra Tucker Haag), the silly white woman who lives on the other side from Rochelle of the house occupied by the titular stranger next door. Both Rochelle and Keele have the hots for Jesse and his tattooed chest and glorious pecs, but it’s Rochelle who finally beds him in a rather desultory soft-core porn scene that would have been considerably hotter in the hands of virtually any Lifetime director besides Victoria Rowell.

Then Rochelklke discovered inconsistencies in Jesse’s account of his background. Rochelle is also taking care of her aging father, Ernest Sellers (Tim Reid), a Viet Nam War veteran with whom Jesse bonds by sharing war stores because Jesse served – or at least says he served – in Iraq. Only Jesse’s military history doesn’t lineup with what he said it was. Rochelle is supposed to be a key witness in the upcoming corruption trial of her ex-husband, and for a while writer Davis leads us to believe that Jesse has been placed next door by Michael himself or his defenders on the police force to place Rochelle in a compromising situation that can be used to discredit her on the witnes stand. There’s a second witness against Michael, Tyler Price (Terry Latham), who can establish that Michael and the cartel leader knew each other despite Michael’s denials, but he gets away from his Black female police handler and gets shot on the streets, presumably to death, though his body is never discovered and Prescott, the young white male FBI agent who’s handling the case, still expects him to turn up and testify. When Rochelle’s computers go kablooey, thanks to malware Jesse planted on them during one of his visits to Rochelle’s bedroom, she immediately realizes he’s up to something evil and forbids her dad from seeing him again. She literally pulls her father out of Jesse’s house where the two of them were going through dad’s old Viet Nam memorabilia and bonding as fellow vets; Jesse has even taken dad to the Viet Nam Memorial, something Rochelle had never agreed to do.

With Rochelle having suddenly broken off with Jesse for reasons she can’t fathom, Keele makes her move on him – only instead of a hot sex session she gets tied up to a cot in his basement and tortured by Jesse, with a cool efficiency that suggests a particularly malevolent doctor ron amok. He has a wide variety of tools, including hammers with which to smash her kneecaps and ice picks and knives to cut her up. Jesse likes to listen to music while he tortures his victims – one of the few legitimately chilling images of the film is him putting on headphones just before he’s about to go to work on a victim – and it’s unclear what happens to her after that. Presumably he kills her, though as with Tyler one wonders how on earth he disposed of her body without leaving a trace. Through much of the movie Davis has kept us wondering whether Jesse is a free-lance sadist or an agent of Michael hired to shut up the witnesses against him, and n the end he turns out to be both: he’s a professional hit man but also one who loves to take time with his victims (especially his female ones) and make their last hours on earth miserable. I don’t know much about people who kill other people for a living, but my understanding is that they almost always work quickly and don’t torture their victims unless the people who hired them wanted some information out of them first. There’s also a plot twist in which an adult protective services worker shows up at Rochelle’s home investigating a complaint of elder abuse against her for the way she’s treated her dad – the complaint was filed by Michael as part of his revenge plot to have Rochelle declared an incompetent caregiver and have Ernest put in a nursing home. A more talented writer than Camara Davis might have made more of the Kafka-esque dilemma Rochelle finds herself in – she can’t go to the police because the police are on Michael’s side against her – but Davis can’t be bothered.

The film lumbers to a predictable conclusion in which Rochelle ends up in Jesse’s dungeon about to be tortured to death the same way Keele was – only she manages to get free of her bonds (for someone as into bondage as Jesse, he’s not very good at it) and dad attacks Jesse with an old pistol he kept from his service days in Viet Nam. Just as Jesse mocks him for using such an old and presumably unreliable gun, it jams, but the distraction has given Rochelle time to grab Jesse’s gun and shoot him with it. The central premise of Stranger Next Door could actually have made a pretty good Lifetime movie, but Camara Davis is one of those scenarists who, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, believes in writing at least six impossible things before breakfast, and Victoria Rowell’s slovenly, ah-the-hell-with-it direction matches the quality (or lack thereof) of Davis’s writing all too well. It also doesn’t help that Vicky Jeudy as Rochelle has her hair cut so severely short she looks like a man in most of her close-ups; through much of the fimn I kept wondering, “Who’s that guy? Oh, it’s Rochelle!” The film’s costume designer, Ann Thomas, hasn’t helped her any by giving her tops and vests that mash down her breasts. Cmon. haven’t you people ever seen Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where for the last quarter-century (almost) Mariska Hargitay has proven you can be both a tough cop and a hot, sexy, voluptuous woman at the same time?