Last night (March 18) I watched a pretty good Lifetime movie called The Hillsdale Adoption Scam which was supposedly inspired by true stories of various adoption scams, though this one looked luridly fictional and, judging from my experience last week with the film Girl in the Closet and how the true story that inspired it turned out to be a lot more horrifying than the movie, I’m inclined to think that the actual stories that inspired this film were probably more interesting than the movie itself. This film actually had some quirky similarities with the year-old Lifetime movie I’d watched the night before, Bad Nanny, in that both films revolved around a mixed-race straight couple (he white, she Black) in which the Black woman had a much stronger economic position than the white man. It starts out with a reasonably happy family of four – Terrence and Bethany Hornby (hunky, bearish Michael Strickland and Keisha Knight Pulliam, a frequent fixtore in Lifetime movies when they need a Black female authority figure), their daughter Mila (Leona Katambi) and their foster son, whom at first I thought was named ‘Kevin” but who turns out to be named “Gavin.” The Hornbys are in the process of adopting Gavin, but just as the adoption process is almost completed, Gavin’s birth mother sends them a registered letter demanding him back. Bethany in particular is bereft at the sudden loss of a child she had bonded with and come to think of as hers. So she’s a sitting duck for the titular adoption scam, as Georgia (Danika Frederick, in what’s apparently her first film) shows up at the Hornbys’ home claiming to be running in fear of her abusive boyfriend Puck (David Tomlinson). Puck duly shows up lurking around, carrying a knife and looking suitably sinister, and when Bethany realizes that Georgia is pregnant she offers to adopt the baby herself.
Georgia demands $30,000 along with an apartment and a car.and the ludicrously generous Bethany says yes. She also hires Georgia as her assistant in her interior design firm, and Georgia gets rid of a particularly nasty client of Bethany’s whom she inherited when her father, who founded the design business, died several months previously. Director Asia Youngman and writer Justin D. James (so this is yet another Lifetime m movie directed by a woman but written by a man!) take their own sweet time explaining just what the scheme is and who’s involved in it – it’s not until midway through that we see Georgia and Puck alone together in the apartment Bethany is paying for so Georgia can presumably be sheltered from him (we get to see him topless and tattooed and he’s pretty hot) – and the third member of their gang is Carmen (Lauren Cochrane), a middle-aged, heavy-set woman who insists on watching as Puck and Georgia have sex and wh o has killed the previous victims of their scheme despite Puck’s objection; since he doesn’t want blood on their hands. Exactly what they get out of this besides free houses and cars isn’t clear, but the Terrible Trio decide that they’re going to make one big killing at Bethany’s expense by stealing $600,000 worth of precious art treasures being “temporarily” removed from a home Bethany is redecorating. Bethany has an assistant, Desi – also a Black woman – who, like the usual Heroine’s African-American Best Friend in a Lifetime Movie, learns of the villains’ plot but doesn’t get to warn the heroine in time because the bad guys learn she’s on to them and drop a heavy shelf of various knicknacks on her in Bethany’s office basement and she ends up hospitalized and comatose.
There’s also a subplot in which Terrence has been fired from his job but conceals that fact from Bethany – we first get wind of this when she calls him and thinks he’s at home; we can see he’s at home but he lies and says he’s at the office. Bethany sees Terrence having lunch with a woman and, since he’s already had an extramarital affair, thinks, “Here we go again,” and when she coinfronts hmi with the information he explains that this was j ost a job interview with a woman employer. (As my husband Charles would say, “A job interview? Is that what they’re calling it now?”) Eventually the gang confront Bethany and tie her up and gag her, demanding that she call Terrence and tell him she’s going to be spending tne iight with Desi in her hospital room, and he had Mila decide to surprise her – and there’s a final confrontation between everybody in which good triumphs over evil and the bad people wind up either arrested or dead. The Hillsdale Adoption Scam has a few good things going for it, but it doesn’t help that five years ago Lifetime did another, and much better, adoption-scam film called Maternal Secrets (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/05/maternal-secrets-marvista-entertainment.html) with a better director and writer, and a cast including Kelly McGillis, female lead form the original Top Gun lo those many years ago.
