Abducted in the Everglades (Sunshine Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The “something else” my husband Charles and I watched after the Academy Awards on Sunday, March 2 turned out to be two pretty good Lifetime movies: Abducted in the Everglades (originally shot under the title Lost in the Everglades, which doesn’t sound that different except “Abducted” conveys a greater sense of menace than just “Lost”), and the film turned out to be a pretty wild but entertaining suspense tale. The film follows two young women who are about to enter college after growing out of their high-school senior year. One is Carli O’Connell (Tommi Rose), daughter of overprotective mother Beverly O’Connell (Tori Spelling, who also developed this story and co-produced the film even though three other people – Dane K. Braun, Thomas Dolan-Gavitt, and Richard Pierce – wrote it). Her friend is Simone Sayles (Nikki Nunziato), shorter, mousier and brown-haired instead of blonde like Carli but still hot to trot. They’re drinking at an outdoor bar and the bartender is ignoring them, but they’re accosted by a nice-looking young man named Pete (Nick Flaig) who invites them to a private party where they’ll really be able to tie one on. The two women walk up the strand on South Beach, Florida with Pete and get to the location of the alleged party – only to find there’s just one other person there, and it’s Luke Burns (Joseph Cannon). Luke and Carli were a couple until recently, when Carli got offered admission and a scholarship to her dream college and she decided Luke was too ambition-less to be bothered with anymore. Luke hot-footed it to Florida and hooked up with his friend and cousin Pete for a revenge plot. His idea was to get Carli drunk so he could shoot some sexually explicit photos of her and post them online, whereupon the admissions people at her dream school would be horrified and withdraw their offer to her. Of course, things quickly spiral out of control; Carli is sufficiently worried about losing her cell phone she checks it and her backpack containing it at a nearby storage locker, but Simone still has her phone and uses it to upload footage of their whereabouts to show what a good time they’re having.

Carli’s mom Beverly has hacked into Carli’s social media feed, which is showing all Simone’s footage, but she has no idea where they are and she panics when her calls to her own daughter’s phone keep going to voicemail and her texts also go unanswered. For some reason Pete gives Simone a drink spiked with the “date rape” drug GHB, and she reacts by foaming at the mouth. Pete and Luke leave her for dead on the beach, though luckily she’s discovered in time and ends up in a hospital, comatose for a few days but still alive. Believing that they’ve just killed someone, Pete and Luke flee to Pete’s crash-pad style home in the Everglades and then fret about how they’re going to cover it up. One of the ways they’re going to do that is by throwing Simone’s phone into the swamp, whereupon all the uploads to Carli’s Web sites magically disappear and Beverly gets even more freaked out that now she has no idea where her daughter is, what she’s doing or what might be being done to her. So she flies out to Florida herself and meets a hunky man her age named Ray (Nick Ballard, who frankly did a lot more for me in the looks department than either Nick Flaig or Joseph Cannon did!) who says he’ll help her find her daughter. Alas, Beverly is tricked by Pete into coming with her in one of the “air boats” (staples of every movie ever made about the Everglades: they’re the boats with giant propellers outside the water because normal underwater propellers would just clog up from all the vegetation in the swamp), allegedly to find her daughter. Pete is hoping for a chance to knock off Beverly in the swamp and make it look like an accident, but Ray figures out what’s going on and gets his own air boat to give chase. Ray actually rescues Beverly and Carli, who’s managed to escape her captors (not that that was all that hard since Pete and Luke aren’t exactly the brightest stars in the local criminal firmament), but he entrusts Carli with driving the boat back and Carli crashes it on a sandbar.

Ultimately Ray and Pete confront each other and Pete stabs Ray with a knife, but in a later scene it’s Pete who’s eliminated permanently when he’s bitten by a copperhead snake (earlier we’ve learned that Ray works for the Florida state government literally as a snake-killer; his job is to rid the Everglades of pythons, an invasive species that threaten the local raccoons and opossums; he also just happens to volunteer at the hospital where Simone – ya remember Simone? – is staying while the doctors and nurses bring her back to consciousness) and then falls into the swamp, where an alligator eats him. (When we first saw that alligator in act one I joked, “This is how Chekhov would have written if he’d been born and raised in Florida.”) Pete also visits the hospital where Simone is staying and intends to knock her off by smothering her with a pillow, but fortunately Beverly arrives just as he does and he hides out while she questions Simone – who still isn’t well enough to leave, but has regained her consciousness and memory – and after Beverly leaves, does Pete go ahead with his plan to murder Simone? Ya remember what I said earlier about Pete not being an especially smart bad guy? No-o-o-o-o, he just stalks out and the chases resume. It ends with the cops arriving on the scene in an air boat of their own and arresting Luke, who can’t escape because Beverly thoughtfully pocketed the ignition key of the air boat he’d rented, while Beverly, Carli and Ray are rescued and it looks like Beverly and Ray will become lovers. Abducted in the Everglades was actually a lot of fun, ably directed by Lifetime veteran Damián Romay, and though his writing committee left a lot of holes in their plot, Romay moved it along fast enough there wasn’t much time to think about or dwell on them.