Danger in the Dorm (Lifetime Films, Lifetime Television, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 22) I watched a rerun of the Lifetime “premiere” from the week before: Danger in the Dorm, a workmanlike tale of, well, danger facing a group of college students at the relatively new (established 1967) Brighton University in the Poconos, which I’d always thought were in upstate New York but are actually in Pennsylvania. The central characters are actually Kathleen Roberts (Clara Alexandrova) and her domineering mother Joanne (Bethnney Frankel, top-billed). Kathleen has just started her freshman (freshperson?) year at Brighton and is looking forward to getting out from under the iron grip of her mother, who brings new meaning to the term “overprotective.” Mom has been especially suspicious of Kathleen because one day she came home from work unexpectedly early and found Kathleen messing around with a boy and apparently preparing for sex, though we get the impression mom’s arrival put the kibosh on the proceedings before they ever got to the actual down ‘n’ dirty. We also get the impression that Kathleen owes her existence to her mom having similarly played fast ‘n’ loose with her virginity when she was Kathleen’s age. She had a one-night stand with a guy who knocked her up and went on his way, forcing her to abandon her lofty career ambitions and take whatever sorts of jobs she could to raise Kathleen as a single parent. (We’re not told this in so many words by writers Benjamin Anderson and Ramona Barckert, but they certainly hint at it strongly enough and it’s the only reason we can think of for why Joanne is so determined that Kathleen not have sex and why Kathleen’s dad isn’t in the picture.)

Kathleen has a long-time best friend, Becky Swafford (Grace Vukovic), who signed up for Brighton to be with Kathleen, be her dorm roommate and even enrolled in all Kathleen’s classes, but within a few days of the start of the school term Kathleen and Becky have an argument because Becky insists that Kathleen’s mother was right that she should wait to have sex. As a result Kathleen asks for a single room in the dorm and Becky drops out of all the classes she and Kathleen were enrolled in together. Then Becky gets stabbed to death and the police immediately suspect Kathleen. Kathleen’s alibi was she was doing some late-night studying at the school library with Wade (Jason Fernandes), but Wade slipped out of the library and then slipped back in, so Kathleen can’t be sure that Wade didn’t kill Becky. The police assign an African-American detective named Jessica Harken (Lily Yawson) to the case, and later another woman student, Tammy Bennett (Marlowe Zimmerman), gets assaulted by being clubbed from behind with a brick. The school’s dean, Matt Carrigan (Milo Shandell), announces that any student who wishes to drop out will be allowed to do so without penalty and will be readmitted the following semester, and Joanne Strongly urges Kathleen to take that option, but at the last minute Kathleen decides to stay in school and do her own investigation into Becky’s murder and Tammy’s assault. The finger of suspicion points first at Conor Miller (Jeffrey Pal, who looks Asian despite his character’s bland Anglo last name), who hassled Becky at a frat party before she was killed, but from the moment I watched that scene I thought, “Red herring!,” and I was right.

When Detective Harken tries to interrogate Kathleen at the school cafeteria, mom Joanne comes on the scene, goes ballistic and insists that Kathleen not to speak to the police without an attorney present. Joanne even hires a lawyer and gives Kathleen his business card, with instructions to call him in case the cops try to question her again. About half an hour before the end, the cops actually arrest another suspect at a nearby school and everybody breathes a sigh of relief. This happens after an opening flash-forward in which we see the new attack the guy got popped for, though when Detective Harken questions him, he insists that he clubbed Tammy with a steel pipe instead of a brick. She angrily dismisses him as a copycat and reopens the case. Eventually the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Patrick (Matthew Nelson-Mahood), the proverbial nice guy with a seeming heart of gold even though he’s also something of a “bad boy” who’s learned to make fake ID’s and fake pass cards to get into and out of electronically locked doors on campus. Patrick is what’s come to be called an “incel” (short for “involuntarily celibate”), a straight guy who somehow can’t get women to have sex with him and responds with a murderous rage against them. (I remember joking to a friend after an “incel” went on a murder spree in Santa Barbara that it was a pity that people can’t change their sexual orientation voluntarily, since though they may have struck out with women, some of the “incels” I’ve seen photos of looked like they could do well in a Gay bar.)

It took me about an hour and a half into this two-hour (including commercials) film to guess that Patrick would turn out to be the killer, though Kathleen doesn’t realize it until she sees him carrying Becky’s teddy bear around with him. They’re in the school’s computer room, where Patrick is making Kathleen a fake ID so she can get into bars (he made it with her real name but advanced her age to 23). Patrick has his laptop with him but Kathleen gets on one of the school’s own computers, which are old enough they still have CRT monitors, and uses it to send an e-mail to Detective Harken to get her to send a squad to arrest him. Danger in the Dorm is an unusual Lifetime movie in one respect: Lifetime produced it itself instead of buying it from a production company like Hybrid, Johnson Production Group or Reel One Entertainment. The director is Robin Hays (a woman), who has seven previous directorial credits on imdb.com plus two more “in production,” including another Lifetime thriller called Amish Affair that’s already far enough along Lifetime ran a promo for it for July 6. She’s got the requisite flair for suspense and getting Gothic atmosphere even out of plain, ordinary modern architecture, but as is so often the case with Lifetime directors she’s hamstrung by a pretty formulaic and predictable script. The parts of Danger in the Dorm that rang truest for me were the scenes between Kathleen and her mother Joanne, whose combination of outward domination and below-the-surface caring reminded me all too vividly of my own mother! Danger in the Dorm was based on a story by true-crime writer Ann Rule, though it’s unclear whether this was supposed to be fact-based or Rule just wrote a work of fiction this time.