Nightmare School Moms (Juniper Lane Productions, Johnson Producton Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 16) I watched a pretty good Lifetime movie called Nightmare School Moms, which though the credited company was something called “Juniper Lane Productions” actually came from our old friends at the Johnson Production Group, including Ken Sanders, J. Bryan Dick (Sanders is credited with the “original” story and both with the script) and director Danny J. Boyle (the “other” Danny Boyle). Despite the plural title, there’s actually only one nightmare school mom in the story: she’s Lacy Settle (Crystal Allen), who’s psychopathically determined to get her daughter Nicole (Rachel Walters) into Whittendale University. Given that previous Whittendale University movies from the Johnson Production Group have depicted that campus as one whose nubile female students all have to prostitute themselves to afford its sky-high tuition, a discerning (or cynical) viewer like myself might well decide the two rival girls, the white Nicole and the African-American Parker Williams (Tatiana Le’Joy), would be better off not going there at all. Lacy’s derangement is explained by the fact that years before, when both she and Parker Williams’ mom Mandy (April Hale) were in high school themselves, Mandy beat out Lacy for the one admission slot at Whittendale for a girl from their high school. As a result, Lacy’s super-rich father, Drake Settle (Leonardo Scattereggia), whom we meet in the opening sequence, a birthday party for him, has never forgiven Lacy for losing the coveted slot at Whittendale. The fact that all three generations of Settles have the same last name is explained by Lacy’s never having married; she got pregnant as a result of a one-night stand with a man who immediately abandoned her after he knocked her up, and she raised Nicole as a single mother.

Parker, on the other hand, comes from an intact family; her dad is a studly man named Sean Williams (Michael Stiggers) who shows off a nice basket through his tan slacks. It’s nice to see a Lifetime movie featuring a hot, sexy guy who’s not a villain, and this one has two; when people start turning up dead as part of Lacy’s plot, the people the police assign to investigate are a Black woman, Detective Cox (Olivia Crosby), and a really hot white guy, Detective Fisher (Brad Worch II), who set off my Lust-O-Meter big-time. The plot kicks off when it turns out that Nicole Settle and Parker Williams are running against each other for student body president, and it’s established that whichever one wins will get an important leg-up in the admissions process for Whittendale. Parker wins in the early vote count but, at Lacy’s insistence, Nicole refuses to concede and instead Lacy demands a recount, sounding so much like Donald Trump and his minions insisting that Trump, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election I wondered if Sanders and Dick were parodying the incredibly outlandish arguments made by the Trump forces about “election fraud” and the “Deep State.” Lacy steals the blank ballot form and makes extra copies to fake a win for Nicole, but she’s unable to smuggle them into the locked ballot box in time for the recount, which Parker wins by an even bigger margin than before. Lacy makes dark allusions about why Mandy Williams quit her political consulting job in Wisconsin and moved to the film’s Georgia locale (the one driver’s license we see lists Atlanta as the city of residence but the film actually takes place in a suburb), saying it was because she was caught rigging an election, but the real reason was that Mandy had a chronic heart condition and her husband and her doctors both thought she’d do better in a less urban and less hostile environment.

Lacy seeks out the services of Bill Yellen (Allen Burns), who advertises himself as “The Prep Guy,” to boost Nicole’s test scores to overcome the disadvantage Nicole has faced by losing the race for student body president, and Yellen arranges a chance for Nicole to re-take one of the qualification tests – only the night before the exam Nicole sneaks out to a drunken party (there’s a marvelously done sequence in which Nicole, essentially forced to stay in her room the night of the party, watches streaming video of it on her phone and eventually sneaks out to attend it in person). The moment we see red plastic Dixie cups, we know underage drinking is going on, and eventually Nicole gets so wasted she ends up crashing at Mandy’s and Parker’s home. They drive her back home in the morning but she’s in no condition to take a test – not when she’s practically hugging the toilet because she’s so sick to her stomach. No problem, though; Lacy disguises herself as Nicole, puts on a red hoodie, goes to the test site and takes the test in her daughter’s stead, only she’s caught by Bill Yellen, who demands nearly $10,000 in blackmail money as well as the sex Lacy originally promised him. He orders her to meet him in room five at a local motel and bring both the cash and her body, but Lacy – who’s already killed her own dad by withholding the oxygen tank he needed (Lillian Hellman strikes again! The more Lifetime people copy the great scene from the 1941 film The Little Foxes in which Bette Davis knocks off her inconvenient husband, Herbert Marshall, by withholding his heart medication and leaving him to die, the better Davis, Marshall and director William Wyler look by comparison) – brings a metal meat tenderizer and knocks off Yellen with it and an iron.

Then Lacy decides to ensure that Nicole, not Parker, will get the coveted Whittendale slot by planting drugs in Parker’s backpack – only she does this at the local coffeehouse where Parker buys a foamy coffee drink every morning before school, and the Black barista shows Mandy the security footage which, despite showing the nightmare mom just from the back (when Lacy planted the stuff she was wearing the same hoodie she wore to the test site when she impersonated Nicole), allows Mandy and Parker to deduce that Lacy was the culprit. At the big day of the college fair where the representative from Whittendale will interview both Nicole and Parker and decide which one to take, Nicole has an attack of conscience and blabs to the Whittendale representative all the cheating Lacy has done on her behalf. Someone whips out a phone and shoots a video which goes online and becomes viral. Lacy decides to have her revenge by overpowering Mandy and Parker, tying them up in their home (Sean, Parker’s dad, is conveniently out of town on business at the time) and squirting them with lighter fluid so she can immolate them. Only Nicole catches on and goes to warn the Williamses about Lacy, and the police, who were staking out the Settles home, follow her and ultimately catch and arrest Lacy before she can start the blaze that would kill Mandy and Parker. The final scene is preposterous even by the standards of the Johnson Production Group and Lifetime: the Williamses are reunited, Parker and Nicole both decide they don’t want to attend Whittendale after all (maybe they’ve seen previous Whittendale-universe movies and don’t want to have to whore themselves for the tuition), and the last we see of Lacy she’s leading some sort of class in prison with hard-bitten woman convicts skeptical of her insistence that if they apply themselves they can rise above their current situations.

Though this one doesn’t push the envelopes of typical Lifetime situations the way their better movies have, it’s still a relatively good one of its type and it benefits from a full-throated villainess performance by Crystal Allen as Lacy. Allen doesn’t roll out the usual “psycho villain” movie tropes; instead she creates an understandable character who’s been so poisoned by her father’s having written her off as a failure because she didn’t make it into Whittendale that she’s become crazy. It’s established that dad is himself a Whittendale alumnus who could have got Nicole in by just one rank-pulling phone call, only instead he denounced that as “cheating” and refused to do it – and given that the U.S. Supreme Court just declared race-based affirmative action programs unconstitutional while not saying anything about legacy admissions (i.e., affirmative action for white people), this story about equally qualified white and Black students pitted against each other in a contest over a college admission slot no doubt plays quite differently than it did when Messrs. Sanders and Dick conceived it!