Single Black Female 2: Simone's Revenge (Swirl Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 2) Lifetime showed a “premiere” sequel called Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge, a follow-up to an O.K. movie called Single Black Female about the rivalry between Monica Harris (Raven Goodwin) and Simone Hicks (Amber Riley), her half-sister (different moms, same dad) who shows up in her life as Monica is fighting to replace the retiring host of an insipid morning TV show called Tea Time on a local station in Houston. I’d caught up with the original Single Black Female on April 24. 2022 and posted about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/single-black-female-johnson-production.html, and had found it pretty mediocre and clichéd. This time around Lifetime showed the original Single Black Female just before airing Single Black Female 2, and I liked it even less than I had before. Single Black Female 2 takes place in Seattle three years after the events of the original. Monica Harris and her best friend Bebe Morgan (K. Michelle) have just relocated to Seattle following Monica’s breakup with her boyfriend (whom I presume was Eric, played by Devale Harris, a tech person at the TV station where she worked and who was a truly hot stud!). Monica has got a job hosting an investigative journalism show called Red Alert on a Seattle station, though she has to deal with a very domineering boss, Kendyl Rouse (Christine Horne). Kendyl is another African-American woman, considerably slimmer than either Monica or Simone, with a fierce mien and shaved head. She looks like what Sinéad O’Connor would have if she’d been Black, and midway through the film she turns out to be a Lesbian. Kendyl casually tells Bebe that she was invited to a three-way with a celebrity couple in Hollywood, and when Bebe innocently asks her how she felt being with a woman for the first time, Kendyl actually says it was her first time with a man.

Kendyl has decided to exploit Monica’s real-life history with a stalker as part of her show, in hopes of building up interest in the series and increasing its viewer base. At first we think Monica is doing this on her own and breaking Kendyl’s rule that she read the teleprompter scripts verbatim, but later we learn it was the other way around; Kendyl incorporated Monica’s experience into her script without giving Monica a heads-up that she was doing that. The problem is that the show somehow reaches the convent in Houston where Simone was staying; after the end of the first Single Black Female Simone was presumed dead but was actually taken in by a Black Mother Superior and given the name “Sister Grace” because it was by the grace of God that she survived and found a place in the convent. Along the way she got amnesia and lost any sense of who she’d been before, only seeing Monica on TV telling her story about being stalked by Simone reawakens Simone’s memories about her true identity. She determines to go to Seattle and do what she can to destroy Monica’s life and success. Monica has been having nightmares about Simone but has no idea that Simone is really alive, or that her broadcasts have “outed” her and launched Simone on a new revenge campaign motivated, as it was in the first film, by family jealousies. It seems that Monica’s dad was an outwardly respectable politician and financier, but he had an extra-relational affair with Simone’s mother and she resulted. She never forgave her dad for having abandoned her while obsessing over Monica, and so she killed the father before the first film’s story began and went on a murder spree that carried over into both films. Simone lands a place to live with Layla Clinton (Morgan Alexandria), makeup director for Red Alert, after Layla’s previous roommate left her to move in across the street with her new boyfriend and a loudly barking dog. Immediately Simone confronts the ex-roommate and forces her to cough up the money Layla said she owed her by grabbing the dog and threatening its life.

Then she graduates to human victims, slitting Kendyl’s throat and sending an e-mail Monica had written about her frustrations with Kendyl as a boss to the station’s human resources department so when the cops, in the person of an Asian-American detective named Hudson (John Crow) who’s so focused on the most obvious suspect Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories looks like a model of open-mindness by comparison, get it they immediately assume Monica murdered her troublesome boss. Simone also knocks off Bebe and Monica’s latest boyfriend, Detective Trevor Williams (Kendrick Cross), whom she gets to by donning kinky regalia and bringing a whip and handcuffs to a date he thinks is with Monica. (I’ve often complained about movies that asked us to believe people who don’t look at all alike playing blood relatives, but this time I think they overdid it: Raven Goodwin and Amber Riley look so much alike at times the only way we can tell them apart is by the discreet but noticeable nose ring Riley as Simone wears in one nostril.) Monica hatches a plot to catch Simone literally on camera at the TV station, but it requires the assistance of both Bebe and Layla – only Layla double-crosses Monica and gets killed by Simone for her pains. Ultimately [spoiler alert!], in an utterly nihilistic ending that turned me against writers Tessa Evelyn Scott and Sa’Rah Jones (that’s how her credit is spelled) and director Shari Lynette Carpenter (who all had those jobs on the first Single Black Female as well, though Carpenter’s directorial credit on the first film only had an initial “L.” instead of a middle name), Monica gets arrested and goes to prison for the murders while Simone visits her in prison and gloats.

Then Simone goes back to Houston, returns to the convent (ya remember the convent?) and is welcomed back with open arms – only the Mother Superior introduces her to a woman who claims she’s Simone’s long-lost daughter Joy (Angel Pean). Simone remembered giving birth to Joy but her assumption (and ours) was that she had either been stillborn or died shortly afterwards, and the final closeup is of Joy with a sinister glint in her eyes that suggests she’s as bitter towards Simone as Simone was towards Monica. I really don’t like crime stories in which the criminal gets away with it for the same reason Raymond Chandler didn’t; he wrote a letter in which it was necessary for a good crime story that the criminal gets punished at the end, even if not legally. “It has nothing to do with morality; it’s about the logic of the form,” Chandler wrote (I’m quoting him from memory here). If the criminal isn’t punished, “it leaves a sense of irritation.” That’s what it did here, big-time; it took me about 20 to 25 minutes of the genuinely great film I watched after it before I’d washed the bad taste out of my mouth (and my mind) of the ending of Single Black Female 2.