Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 11) my husband Charles and I watched Lifetime’s “Premiere” movie, Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend. You could probably write it yourself just based on that silly title, but here I go with a plot summary anyway. Carly Brooks (Leigha Sinnott) is taking a summer vacation just before her senior year at the University of Southern Pennsylvania (which, at least according to a Wikipedia list purporting to show all the colleges in Pennsylvania, doesn’t exist). She’s living with her father, Grant Brooks (John Castle), who’s raised her as a single parent since the death of her mother, and hanging out a lot with her best friend from kindergarten, Jenna (Courtney Grace). Things change dramatically for her when she’s at a coffeehouse where she meets a young man of almost unearthly beauty, Abram Mast (Sam Bullington, whose blond good looks reminded Charles of the early 1990’s pop singer Rick Astley, though he ran me Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video during one of the commercial breaks and I didn’t think the two looked that much alike). Abram says he’s Amish, though he’s dressed in normal modern clothes, and he explains to Carly after their meet-cute (he bumps into her and she spills her cup of coffee on him) he’s on his “Rumspringa,” a traditional Amish passage-into-manhood ritual in which a young Amish male is allowed to live among “the English” (the all-purpose term for non-Amish people). Carly is up on Amish culture enough to ask why Abram is doing his “Rumspringa” relatively late in life (it’s usually done in one’s teens and is considered a courtship ritual in which you’re expected to end up with a wife), and he says he put it off because his mother became terminally ill and he felt obligated to stay home and take care of her until she died.

The two spend much of the summer together and Abram starts referring to Carly as his girlfriend – which she isn’t; they’ve lain in bed together but have drawn back from actually having sex. Carly tells Abram that she’s going away to college at the University of Southern Pennsylvania to finish her senior year and she doesn’t want the distraction of a boyfriend, but Abram turns up on campus and claims he’s a student there. Carly asks him how that’s possible when Amish usually stop their formal education after the eighth grade, and Abram says he got a correspondence-school diploma after having done high-school work by mail. Carly’s friend Jenna is suspicious of Abram and his presence on campus, and by flirting with a young Black kid in charge of the University of Southern Pennsylvania’s admissions desk she learns that Abram isn’t enrolled at the college at all. Only Abram, whom we’ve already seen in a prologue offing his previous girlfriend Rachel after she threatened to leave him (though in typical Lifetime fashion it’s only until well after we see it that we learn its significance), assaults Jenna in the women’s restroom and leaves her with a lapse of memory. But she recalls enough that when next she sees Carly she tells Carly that Abram is not a student, and when she confronts Abram about it he says that there was a mixup about his mail-order diploma, but he intends to audit classes until the situation is resolved. When Carly runs into a young man on campus named Wyatt (Nick Clark) and offers to take him to a party, Abram suddenly shows up and knocks Wyatt to the ground, where he hits his head on a rock the way Rachel did in the prologue. Fortunately, Wyatt doesn’t die, but he ends up in a coma until the end of the movie.

Abram then knocks out Carly and takes her to an independent Amish community located somewhere in southern Pennsylvania, which has about as much in common with the orthodox Amish as Warren Jeffs’ infamous “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” did with orthodox Mormonism. There he keeps her in a locked bedroom and announces she’s going to be held there until she agrees to marry him and become a properly submissive Amish wife. Abram’s community turns out to be a sort of Island of Misfit Toys of Amishism; all its members are people who were “shunned” by their previous Amish communities, and they’re living on a farm that was bought by a land development company which later went out of business without building the project they planned for that land. So the misfit Amish squatted on it and started farming it again. Determined that no one from Carly’s former life can ever find her again, Abram first sends out a phony text using Carly’s phone telling Jenna that Carly has willingly agreed to marry him and assume the Amish lifestyle, then smashes the phone to bits with a shovel to make sure no one can use its tracking feature to find Carly. Carly has a heart condition that requires regular doses of a medication, but Abram has a solution for that; he entrusts her care to Mona (Samantha Binkerd), an Amish herbalist who tells Carly that the herb foxglove has the same active ingredient as her prescription med and if she drinks five drops of it with her morning tea, she’ll be fine.

Mona also tells Carly that Abram has a pickup truck stashed on the grounds of the compound and Carly can use it to escape, but Abram somehow gets wind of this (one weakness in the script – Cooper Harrington is the director but no writer is listed on the film’s imdb.com page – is it gives Abram an almost supernatural ability to detect any plots against him) and moves the key, then catches Carly looking in vain for it and subjects her to imprisonment in a D.I.Y. stockade. Carly pleads to be released and ultimately agrees to marry Abram if he’ll let her out, intending to flee once the ceremony is over. To make that possible, she spikes Abram’s teacup with an overdose of foxglove so he’ll get sick and won’t be able to follow her, but eventually he hunts her down in the pickup truck. He’s also been able to overpower her father, who came to the compound intending to rescue Carly but ended up knocked out and tied up in the bed of Abram’s truck. Carly is left alone in the cab of the truck for several minutes, and by the time she thinks to turn on the ignition, it’s too late. Abram shows up, grabs the keys out of the ignition, and throws them into the nearby bushes so no one can find them again. Fortunately for Carly, the cops show up, called by Jenna (ya remember Jenna?), and arrest Abram while letting Carly and her dad go. Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend is every bit as silly as you’d guess from the title, though it has one saving grace: Sam Bullington’s acting as the psycho Amish cutie. Despite the imbecilities of the script, he’s able to turn his affect on the proverbial dime, the almost terminally nice, innocent young man one minute and the desperate killer the next. It would be nice to see him in a better script that offers him more dimension as a character, especially since he’s quite fun to look at (though at my advanced age, I found John Castle as Carly’s dad the sexiest guy in the film), but overall Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend was just as awful as you’d guess from its title and Nick Clark as Wyatt, essentially Carly’s romantic consolation prize, is pretty dorky, especially by comparison to Sam Bullington or John Castle!