The Beach House Murders (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards it was time for Lifetime’s “premiere” for the week, The Beach House Murders, which turned out to be just the usual Lifetime garbage with Black people to commemorate Black History Month. This time the central “pussy in peril” is best-selling mystery writer Sarah Brewer (Brittany Dorey), who’s been blocked on her latest novel for over a year. Her agent, Alice (Ashli Auguillard), suggests that Sarah stay at her beach house for as long as it takes her to finish the book. Only Sarah has a “past”: one year earlier she passed out at the same beach house (at least I think it was supposed to be the same beach house), and when she came to both she and her then-husband Miles (Devante Winfrey) were badly wounded. Miles was arrested and served a one-year sentence for assaulting her, but he’s been released and now he’s hanging around the beach community trying to attract Sarah’s attentions so they can get back together. On her first night at the beach house Sarah wakes up in the middle of the night to find a strange white man in her bed; he’s Jack (Kyle Williams), a not-bad looking youngish fellow who says he’s there to re-enact a sex-and-murder scene from one of Sarah’s novels. Sarah throws Jack out, but later Jack breaks into the beach house and steals the laptop computer that contains Sarah’s latest novel as well as the hard drive to which she’s been backing it up. Jack calls her and demands $100,000 for the return of her book – when Sarah calls Alice to ask what she should do, Alice asks, “Why didn’t you back it up to the cloud?” Sarah reminds Alice, “You told me not to do that because it might get stolen!” If Jack doesn’t get paid, he’ll throw her computer and hard drive into the sea and render the novel unrecoverable.

Kellie starts dating a young ex-Marine who served in Afghanistan, Tony (Cj Hammond) – for some reason Sarah is the only character in the movie writers Josh Ridgway and Doug Campbell (Ridgway got credit for the original story, both got a “screenplay by” credit and Campbell also directed, in the traffic-cop sense) gave a last name – only Tony gets knifed to death three-fourths of the way through while he and Sarah are in bed together. (Maybe Messrs. Ridgway and Campbell read the original Nibelungenlied, in which Siegfried is similarly stabbed while he and his wife Kriemhild are in bed together and she wakes up to find a pile of meat where her husband had been the night before – though like that story, this had me wondering, “How come she didn’t wake up?”) After a lot of wanna-be “sinister” back-and-forth during which Sarah loses her new man, her book contract and her agent – Alice tells Sarah her partners in the agency have instructed her to fire Sarah, and she’s reluctantly complied – ultimately her ex-husband Miles turns out to be the villain behind her ordeals. He was determined to wreck her life completely, and Jack was an out-of-work actor whom Miles hired (how did Miles get the money?) to steal Sarah’s laptop and pose as a blackmailer in exchange for all the cocaine he could snort. Miles drugs Sarah, throws her into the swimming pool on the beachfront property and leaves her to drown – only this time the Seventh Cavalry arrives in the person of Alice, who’s talked her partners into rehiring Sarah.

By this time the plot had got so preposterous that I thought Ridgway and Campbell were going to pull the old Seven Keys to Baldpate gimmick and have the story turn out to be the plot of Sarah’s latest novel – and they came close to doing that when Sarah and Alice are sitting at the beach in portable chairs after Alice has knocked off Miles, Sarah laments that Tony had got killed, and Alice has Tony magically materialize out of the water, alive. Then, however, that turns out merely to be a dream sequence; Sarah had nodded off in her beach chair and dreamed Tony’s resurrection, though the dream leaves her determined to abandon mystery writing and make her next novel a love story instead. Sarah explains to Alice that even though Tony actually died, she’ll have to keep him alive and have her female lead get together with him at the end because “a romance novel needs a happy ending” (a piece of advice I’ve heard from real-life romance novelists, too). The Beach House Murders has all too many of the same flaws as A Widow Seduced: an overly complicated plot and dull, one-dimensional characters we really don’t care that much about even on the rare occasions when we can actually keep track of who’s doing what to whom.