Handyman from Hell (Thirteenth Floor Productions, Exit 19 Productions, HPG, Lifetime, 2023)

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

One good thing about the Academy Awards starting an hour earlier than usual – at 4 p.m. (Pacific time) instead of 5 – was my husband Charles and I got to watch last night’s (Sunday, March 10) Lifetime movie. It had a pretty generic title, Handyman from Hell, though it had a few good points that raised it at least slightly above the norm I was expecting. Maggie Anderson (Liliana Tandon) is a young-ish, single-ish woman – she has a husband, David Starling (David Santiago), but they’re officially separated since Maggie caught him having extra-relational activities with a junior associate in his office. We’re not sure what he does, but she co-runs an architectural firm with her brother Michael (red-headed hunk Steve Hofstetter). They inherited it from their father, and Michael does the actual design work while Maggie runs the business end. Maggie wants her kitchen remodeled, and she goes through a few Zoom interviews with prospective contractors – “Philosophy Contractor” (Michael Ian Black), who feeds her a lot of New Age babble; “Creepy Contractor” (Frank Caliendo), who makes it clear his interest in Maggie’s job is actually in getting into Maggie’s pants (even though he has a wife, whom we learn about because we hear her voice in the background); and “New York Contractor” (Vic Dibitetto), who comes off like he’s just beamed in from GoodFellas. She’s waiting for an interview with the least repulsive man in the bunch, Patrick (Mark Shimkets), only the person who actually shows up is drop-dead gorgeous Nate Brothers (Joey Ariemma).

We already know Nate is a villain not only because he’s absolutely sexy but we’ve already seen him murder a woman he was having an affair with by shooting her with a nail gun. We don’t find out who she was or why he killed her, though at least writer Jay Black took a leaf from Christine Conradt’s book and gave Nate – whose real last name is Hawking (like the late physicist), by the way – a backstory so he’s rationally evil instead of just freaking crazy. It turns out that Nate’s brother was killed in a construction accident building a local arts centre Michael Anderson had designed, when the building collapsed and buried him under 18 tons of concrete. (Nate seems to have a Rosebud-like fixation on the 18-ton number.) On their initial meeting, Nate jokes that he’s tied up Patrick, thrown him in the back of his own van and taken his place – and then director Cody Hartman cuts to the inside of the van and we see Nate has indeed done that. Later he gives the same treatment to Michael and also Maggie’s estranged husband David, though in the final confrontation Michael comes to (albeit minus one of his thumbs, which Nate used a power saw to detach as a form of torture preparatory to killing him) and knocks out Nate, who survives but is arrested. We also learn that Nate has worked his way up through the chain of command of the people involved in the construction project that cost his brother his life, targeting first the developers, then the contractors and finally the architects. And we get a nice soft-core porn sequence between Nate and Maggie, though we don’t get to see them actually having sex even within the limits of Lifetime. We do get to see a nice post-coital shot of his hairless chest and very prominent nipples (yum!). I had the same feeling about Joey Ariemma that I did about Billy Zane when Charles and I saw the 1997 Titanic; he’s so hot and sexy I’d like to see him in a sympathetic role sometime, the way I made it a point to get a used videotape of the film The Phantom so I could watch it the day after Titanic to see Zane as a good guy.