Killing the Competition (Allegheny Image Factory, Hartbreak Films, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 1) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie that I hadn’t had much hope for, but turned out to be better than it had looked from the previews: Killing the Competition, one of Lifetime’s sub-genre involving high-school cheerleaders. It was interesting that they did not include the word “cheerleader” in the title; usually they do that to attract straight males to watch in hopes of seeing lots of hot, nubile underage female flesh. This was a personal project for Melissa Joan Hart, who co-produced and starred as Elizabeth Cooper Fenwick, who’s just moved back to the small town where she grew up. She was reluctant to do that at first, but her husband Steve (Eddie Mills) got a job transfer there that was just too lucrative to pass up. So Elizabeth moves there with her daughter Grace (Lily Brooks O’Briant) and her younger son Jackson (Cyrus McReynolds), and even before the school year starts she forms a fierce determination to have Grace relive all the triumphs of Elizabeth’s own last high-school year, including being lead dancer on the cheerleading squad. Alas, Grace doesn’t even pass the audition for the squad, and Elizabeth lobbies the school board to expand the squad to make room for her daughter. The board finally decides to let everyone who was good enough to make the initial tryouts onto the squad, the “Thresherettes” (apparently this is a farm community and “Threshers” is the official nickname of the school’s athletic teams). This makes Elizabeth even angrier because she claims that that’s just diluted the honor and made it meaningless. The squad’s original coach resigns in protest and is replaced by Nicole Li (Anzu Lawson), whose daughter Hannah (Valerie Loo) was the star of the auditions.

Elizabeth also has taken exception to Grace’s involvement with a boyfriend, Tyler Tulsey (the boyishly cute Lucas Randazzo). Elizabeth is convinced Tyler is only after Grace for her body and once he’s fucked her, he’ll move on. She even tries to convince Grace that Tyler is having an affair with Hannah behind her back, but he isn’t; the only reasons Tyler and Hannah are seeing each other outside school hours are to tutor each other in calculus and to grab Grace’s old batons so she can do a spectacular routine involving them even though the cheer squad at this high school has never used batons before. As the school year starts, Elizabeth’s mania ratchets up; at one point she tries to run Tyler’s bike (an old-style “sting ray” I remember from my childhood in the 1960’s, with relatively small wheels and an extended “banana seat”) off the road with her car (a sports-equipped blue Ford Mustang with a personalized license plate reading, “DANCE 1” – the car practically becomes a character in itself). She also dons a black wig (she’s naturally blonde) so she can sneak into cheer practices and not be recognized, and she steals her daughter’s phone on at least two occasions so she can send fake texts purportedly from Grace. Elizabeth shoots a photo of a bridal gown and writes, “Thinking of the future” – obviously she’s hoping this will scare Tyler off her daughter by making it look like she’s determined to marry him – and later she sends a phony message supposedly from Grace resigning from the cheer squad. Ultimately Elizabeth buys a gun (we get a close-up of the Glock name on it, a bit of product placement the Glock company would probably have wanted to do without) from a gun store, saying she needs it “to protect my family,” and on the night of the big football game she kidnaps both Nicole and Hannah. She takes Hannah to a storage shed where she’s kept all the memorabilia of her own high-school years and ultimately strangles her until she passes out. Leaving Hannah for dead, Elizabeth makes her way back home – but fortunately Hannah recovers, figures out a way to get out of the storage garage (the door to Elizabeth’s own unit is locked but the one on the next shed over is open), and reports what happened to the police. Nicole was able to get away from Elizabeth even earlier and is safe, though neither show up for the opening football game of the season and a Black girl who’d sat in on the tryouts is drafted to join the squad on the spot because they need an even number for their “chair routine.”

I didn’t think I was going to like Killing the Competition, but as things turned out I did. Writers Jane Espenson and Christina Welsh created a marvelously morally ambiguous character for Melissa Joan Hart – reminiscent of the morally uncertain scripts Christine Conradt has contributed to Lifetime over the years – and Hart rose to the challenge magnificently. She grabs hold of the marvelous and sometimes self-contradictory speeches Espenson and Welsh created for her, especially when she acknowledges the transitory nature of high-school fame and the hints they drop on occasion that Grace is not Steve Fenwick’s daughter but the product of a transitory liaison Elizabeth had with a fellow high-school student. When she comes down so hard on Grace for dating Tyler, her motive seems to be a deep (and understandable) desire to keep her daughter from following in her own footsteps and becoming a single mother while still a teenager. Add to that marvelously effective suspense direction by Lee Gabiana – who has only one previous directorial credit, for Gaslit by My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story (a title that riled me because in the original Gaslight the heroine was also being gaslighted by her husband), though I haven’t been able to find out online whether Lee Gabiana is a man or a woman – and Killing the Competition emerges as a quite good thriller and also a study in how maternal overprotectiveness can shade over into absolute psychopathology. Inevitably, as Charles and I were watching this together, I rather grimly commented, “And I thought my mother was crazy!”