by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched two Lifetime movies in quick
succession, both of them at least a bit better than the usual fare on this
channel. The first was called Black Widow Killer and was rather misleadingly title — imdb.com called it The Black Widow Killer and the whole
title tended to be a “spoiler,” while the imdb.com synopsis gave away the careful
construction of Adrian Langley’s script (he also directed) and the suspense he
maintained until revealing the identity and motive of the killer until the very
end. If you looked up the imdb.com page and read its synopsis before seeing the
film (as I did) it would blow Langley’s surprise ending and make this film seem
a lot closer to the usual Lifetime
formulae than it is. It begins with a car accident that happened 25 years
before the main action (though we only learn the time differential until the
very end; we don’t get the usual
Lifetime chyron reading, “25 Years Later … ”) in which a young man and a young
woman named Shannon are stuck in the middle of the road when the man’s car
breaks down. The driver is under the car trying to fix it and calls on Shannon
to start it and see if it turns over; it doesn’t — and then another car, a black or dark blue SUV, comes crashing into
Shannon’s and her boyfriend’s car and an accident occurs, though we don’t learn
for sure who survived it. The film then flashes-forward 25 years to the
present, when Judy Dwyer (Erin Karpluk) is the deputy mayor of Mill Creek
(we’re not sure where in the U.S. this is but it’s probably New England, since
it’s Christmastime and there’s plenty of snow as well as an old deserted mill on
a small river just outside the town, hence the name). She’s married to the town
sheriff, Steven Dwyer (Ryan Robbins), only he’s in the process of divorcing her
and they have a teenage daughter, Abby (Morgan Kohan), who’s about to graduate
from high school and is quite serious about a young man named Daniel Wilson
(Bradley Hamilton), who’s quite hot (and thank you, director Langley, for
giving us old queens in the Lifetime audience some nice mid-shots showing off
his basket). Daniel’s mother Kendra (Alison Brooks) is the most popular teacher
at Abby’s high school and is also Judy’s best friend and the one she goes out
for cheesecake and wine to complain about the way Steven is treating her in the
divorce — especially since they have to keep working together because they’re
both high officials in Mill Creek’s city government.
Things start coming to a
head when a mysterious stranger starts showing up in town stalking the main
characters and issuing them enigmatic warnings that they’re all about to be
killed unless they move out of town forthwith. Judy eventually identifies the
stranger as Jason Hall (Luigi Saracino), who served a long prison sentence for
the traffic accident we saw earlier but got out 12 years ago. When Kendra
Wilson is found dead in her home — at first the police think it was accidental
but, after the medical examiner (called in from out of town because Mill Creek
is too small to have one of its own) find poisons in Kendra’s system, the
police conclude it was murder and arrest Kendra’s son Daniel for the crime (and
keep him in a jail holding cell for the end of the movie). Judy is convinced
that Daniel didn’t kill his mother — especially since they got along well and
he never reported feeling oppressed or threatened by her — and she’s equally convinced
the mysterious Jason Hall is the real killer. Part of what convinces her is a
series of neatly handwritten notes the various principals in the case,
including Kendra, Steven and Judy herself, reported getting from a mysterious
sender, all gnomic messages about guilt and revenge. Judy’s soon-to-be
ex-husband Steven gets dispatched from her life sooner than expected when he becomes the killer’s next victim, and later Jason is
found hanging from the beam of the town’s one bridge (which, had it been in Madison
County, Clint Eastwood would no doubt have photographed) where the original
accident occurred 25 years ago. The cops assume Jason killed the other victims
and then committed suicide, but Judy deduces that Jason was murdered by the
same person who killed the other two — who turns out to be (surprise!) Shannon
Collins (Karen Cliché, whose name seems to invite bad jokes but who’s actually
quite good in the role). We get another flashback to the accident 25 years previously in which Jason Hall was
the driver of Shannon’s car, while the occupants of the car that ran into
theirs were soon-to-be sheriff Steven Dwyer and his high-school girlfriend
Judy, who eventually married him.
Judy wanted to report the accident to the
police of Mill Creek and accept whatever responsibility and punishment the
town’s legal system handed down, but Steven talked her out of it and eventually
the crime was pinned on Jason and he spent 12 years in prison, while Shannon
remained bitter about that and hatched an elaborate revenge plot involving
killing all the other people in the accident and framing Jason for the crime.
There’s the usual Lifetime confrontation at the end and Shannon is taken into
custody for the murders — including the killing of Alice Evans, the substitute
teacher brought in to take over from the murdered Kendra, only Shannon killed her before she could start the job and assumed her
identity. The imdb.com synopsis gives it away by making it sound like The
Wrong Substitute Teacher: “After the
bizarre murder of her favorite teacher and her mother’s friend Kendra Wilson,
for which Kendra’s son Daniel (Abby’s boyfriend) is the prime suspect, she is
replaced by Alice, a substitute teacher. Her mother Judy starts her own
investigation and she soon unveils Abby’s new teacher’s mysterious and dark
past, but Alice is one step ahead in her evil plan.” But despite the giveaway
in the materials on this movie (and to a certain extent in its very title — Black
Widow Killer certainly implies, if nothing
else, that the killer in the story is a woman!), this is actually an unusually
good thriller for Lifetime, with genuinely Gothic atmospherics (especially in
the nighttime exteriors), good suspense direction by Langley and a
well-constructed script that for once does not lead us almost automatically to the right suspect.
For some reason, imdb.com gives the copyright date of Black Widow
Killer as 2018 and contains two reviews of
the movie (both from people who liked it considerably less than I did), but
Lifetime lists it as a “premiere” for March 14, 2020; was it shown earlier in
Canada, where it was made? Still, it’s a quite good thriller, several ticks
above the Lifetime norm and with a quite good performance by Morgan Kohan as
Abby; she’s electrifying in the role, with charisma to burn, and she’s got
major stardom written all over her if she can just find the right role!
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Escaping My Stalker (Blue Sky Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment Worldwide, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Sometimes Lifetime weakens one of their better productions by showing a not quite as good film on a similar theme right after it, and last night they did that with a film misleadingly called Escaping My Stalker, a title which doesn’t really do it justice. It’s actually about a 16-year-old girl who was living on the streets of Los Angeles (though our only clue to that is a 213 area code on one of the local phone numbers she asks to be connected to) named Taylor (Ezmie Garcia, who’s actually quite good and authoritative in the role). Taylor was homeless and forced to live by her wits on the street (though she’s somehow managed to maintain her virginity, something homeless teenage girls almost never can do because too often they’re either raped or turn to prostitution to survive) until she was picked up (licitly speaking) by a middle-aged couple named Larry (Linden Ashby, who also directed the film from Stephen Romano’s script) and Sandy (Alexandra Paul) Stuart. The Stuarts run a homeless shelter downtown but have been so impressed by Taylor’s survival skills and overall goodness — including her outreaches to other homeless kids in the neighborhood — they have adopted her and she’s been living with them for a year. She also has a job working at an indoor skater park when she meets Clu Dunsten (Pedro Correa), a highly talented skateboarder whose brother almost turned pro in the sport until he died (the implication is he went into the military and was killed in combat), a cute, tousled-haired young man with a disarming manner. They start to date, but unbeknownst to either Taylor or anyone else she’s been targeted by a mad killer.
The mad killer is Miles Dyson (Andrew James Allen), and writer Romano decides to tell us what’s going on well before the on-screen characters know it. It seems that on the street Taylor befriended Miles’ brother Randy, only when the Stuarts adopted her she stopped going to the streets and stopped seeing him, so he killed himself. Both Dyson brothers were under the total brainwashing and control of their grandmother Marnie (Mariette Hartley, giving one of those move-out-of-the-way-and-let-the-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances like Ellen Burstyn’s in the Lifetime version of Flowers in the Attic. Marnie Dyson used all the classic brainwashing and “seasoning” techniques to enslave both her grandsons and make them powerless to resist her (“seasoning” is what U.S. slave-traders called the process of breaking the newly captured and transported slaves’ will and getting them to accept their lot, including their utter powerlessness). In the final confrontation scene, Marnie boasts of how she brainwashed her late grandson Randy by locking him in a room without food or light for two months until when she finally released him, he accepted her without question as his benefactor (though he had the presence of mind to escape later on and to latch on to Taylor, only to kill himself when Taylor left the streets to become the Stuarts’ adopted daughter, for which Marnie blames Taylor) — and she says she’s going to do the same thing to Taylor: lock her in a dark room without food for two months, then release her and have her accept Marnie as her lord and mistress — “and then I’m going to slit her pretty little throat.” I made the Flowers in the Attic parallel and certainly both Romano’s writing of Marnie and Mariette Hartley’s chilling playing seem to belong much more to the world of V. C. Andrews than the usual Lifetime formula — even though Pierre David and Tom Berry are the credited producers of Escaping My Stalker and they have previously supplied a lot of Lifetime’s most blatantly formulaic product.
Escaping My Stalker is full of plot holes — notably the whole idea of even the most loving couple, hugely concerned about the fate of the homeless teens attracted to their shelter program, actually taking the huge risks of adopting one (two, since a young, cute Black kid, whom we’re told is 14 even though he has a visible moustache, who helped Larry Stuart after Miles tied him up and gagged him in his home and Taylor gave him her family’s address so he could rescue Larry and call 911, also gets adopted by the Stuarts at the end); also how easily Miles infiltrates the staff at the shelter and he’s even able to plant a bug in the Stuarts’ office without anybody catching on to him even though his whole smoldering James Dean act almost seems to scream out, “Watch out! This one’s dangerous!” I also wished the character of Clu Dunsten had lasted longer instead of being murdered by Miles just before the halfway point, not only because he was cute and a nice counterpoint to Miles’ smoldering evil but offing him seemed the equivalent of offing the white heroine’s African-American female friend who stumbles onto the villain’s plot but gets killed for her pains — and frankly I was hoping that he would make it to the end and become Taylor’s lover. But though I don’t think Escaping My Stalker lived up to the promise of its title, and it wasn’t quite as well directed as Black Widow Killer, it was still a quite good, compelling feature several cuts above the Lifetime norm, and quite haunting in its depiction of the support structures street people build to help each other survive; the idea that there is nobility as well as desperation and greed among homeless people, and they sometimes stab each other in the back but also help each other out at times, is one we need more of in depictions of them. About the only really false note I found in this movie is the rather seedy appearance of Alexandra Paul in one of the parts that’s supposed to represent stability and “normal” life and sanity — but maybe that had at least something to do with how much she reminded me, both physically and in her mannerisms, particularly her weird mix of love and almost suffocating, neurotic protectiveness, of my own mother.
Sometimes Lifetime weakens one of their better productions by showing a not quite as good film on a similar theme right after it, and last night they did that with a film misleadingly called Escaping My Stalker, a title which doesn’t really do it justice. It’s actually about a 16-year-old girl who was living on the streets of Los Angeles (though our only clue to that is a 213 area code on one of the local phone numbers she asks to be connected to) named Taylor (Ezmie Garcia, who’s actually quite good and authoritative in the role). Taylor was homeless and forced to live by her wits on the street (though she’s somehow managed to maintain her virginity, something homeless teenage girls almost never can do because too often they’re either raped or turn to prostitution to survive) until she was picked up (licitly speaking) by a middle-aged couple named Larry (Linden Ashby, who also directed the film from Stephen Romano’s script) and Sandy (Alexandra Paul) Stuart. The Stuarts run a homeless shelter downtown but have been so impressed by Taylor’s survival skills and overall goodness — including her outreaches to other homeless kids in the neighborhood — they have adopted her and she’s been living with them for a year. She also has a job working at an indoor skater park when she meets Clu Dunsten (Pedro Correa), a highly talented skateboarder whose brother almost turned pro in the sport until he died (the implication is he went into the military and was killed in combat), a cute, tousled-haired young man with a disarming manner. They start to date, but unbeknownst to either Taylor or anyone else she’s been targeted by a mad killer.
The mad killer is Miles Dyson (Andrew James Allen), and writer Romano decides to tell us what’s going on well before the on-screen characters know it. It seems that on the street Taylor befriended Miles’ brother Randy, only when the Stuarts adopted her she stopped going to the streets and stopped seeing him, so he killed himself. Both Dyson brothers were under the total brainwashing and control of their grandmother Marnie (Mariette Hartley, giving one of those move-out-of-the-way-and-let-the-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances like Ellen Burstyn’s in the Lifetime version of Flowers in the Attic. Marnie Dyson used all the classic brainwashing and “seasoning” techniques to enslave both her grandsons and make them powerless to resist her (“seasoning” is what U.S. slave-traders called the process of breaking the newly captured and transported slaves’ will and getting them to accept their lot, including their utter powerlessness). In the final confrontation scene, Marnie boasts of how she brainwashed her late grandson Randy by locking him in a room without food or light for two months until when she finally released him, he accepted her without question as his benefactor (though he had the presence of mind to escape later on and to latch on to Taylor, only to kill himself when Taylor left the streets to become the Stuarts’ adopted daughter, for which Marnie blames Taylor) — and she says she’s going to do the same thing to Taylor: lock her in a dark room without food for two months, then release her and have her accept Marnie as her lord and mistress — “and then I’m going to slit her pretty little throat.” I made the Flowers in the Attic parallel and certainly both Romano’s writing of Marnie and Mariette Hartley’s chilling playing seem to belong much more to the world of V. C. Andrews than the usual Lifetime formula — even though Pierre David and Tom Berry are the credited producers of Escaping My Stalker and they have previously supplied a lot of Lifetime’s most blatantly formulaic product.
Escaping My Stalker is full of plot holes — notably the whole idea of even the most loving couple, hugely concerned about the fate of the homeless teens attracted to their shelter program, actually taking the huge risks of adopting one (two, since a young, cute Black kid, whom we’re told is 14 even though he has a visible moustache, who helped Larry Stuart after Miles tied him up and gagged him in his home and Taylor gave him her family’s address so he could rescue Larry and call 911, also gets adopted by the Stuarts at the end); also how easily Miles infiltrates the staff at the shelter and he’s even able to plant a bug in the Stuarts’ office without anybody catching on to him even though his whole smoldering James Dean act almost seems to scream out, “Watch out! This one’s dangerous!” I also wished the character of Clu Dunsten had lasted longer instead of being murdered by Miles just before the halfway point, not only because he was cute and a nice counterpoint to Miles’ smoldering evil but offing him seemed the equivalent of offing the white heroine’s African-American female friend who stumbles onto the villain’s plot but gets killed for her pains — and frankly I was hoping that he would make it to the end and become Taylor’s lover. But though I don’t think Escaping My Stalker lived up to the promise of its title, and it wasn’t quite as well directed as Black Widow Killer, it was still a quite good, compelling feature several cuts above the Lifetime norm, and quite haunting in its depiction of the support structures street people build to help each other survive; the idea that there is nobility as well as desperation and greed among homeless people, and they sometimes stab each other in the back but also help each other out at times, is one we need more of in depictions of them. About the only really false note I found in this movie is the rather seedy appearance of Alexandra Paul in one of the parts that’s supposed to represent stability and “normal” life and sanity — but maybe that had at least something to do with how much she reminded me, both physically and in her mannerisms, particularly her weird mix of love and almost suffocating, neurotic protectiveness, of my own mother.
Monday, March 9, 2020
Kidnap (Di Bonaventura Pictures, Gold Star Films, 606 Films, Relativity Media, Universal, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime presentation was of a film called Kidnap, and they ballyhooed the presence of Halle Berry as star so relentlessly I had got the idea that Kidnap Starring Halle Berry was actually the film’s title. I had also assumed the movie was made for Lifetime, but it was a wanna-be theatrical release from a company called Relativity Media which raised money from investors by claiming they had a mathematical formula that would ensure long-term success and a steady stream of profits from an industry as inherently chancy as filmmaking. Alas, after a series of commercial bombs they were forced to declare bankruptcy in 2017 and the remaining films in their pipeline were sold to other studios. Kidnap is prefaced by the usual plethora of production company credits — Di Bonaventura Pictures, Gold Star Films, 606 Films — and casts Halle Berry as Louisiana resident Karla Dyson, who’s just gone through a divorce and is fighting her ex-husband for custody of their young son (he’s supposed to be 6 but looks more like 8 or 9) Frankie (Sage Correa) even though Frankie’s dad and dad’s new girlfriend both have professional jobs while Karla is barely scraping by as a waitress. In the opening scene she’s shown on the job getting into an argument with a couple of parents and their heavily spoiled young son about just what they will order, and Karla can’t help but mutter an insult to them even though that sort of thing could get her fired. Then she takes Frankie to a playground, only in the middle of their outing she has to take a phone call, she turns away from him, and when she turns back he’s gone.
Karla gets a glimpse of him being grabbed by a shadowy figure and pulled into a 1980’s Ford Mustang GT of indeterminate color — it’s described in the script as green but it looked teal blue to me — and she doesn’t get its license-plate number because it doesn’t appear to have one. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling the police on her cell phone, Karla decides to chase the Mustang on foot and actually grabs on to it, though of course nothing she does can stop the car (hey, Halle, when you made a DC Comics Universe movie you were Catwoman, not Wonder Woman!), so she gets into her own car, a red Chrysler Town Car SUV that has a hard time keeping up with the Mustang even though, as some imdb.com posters pointed out, the two are about equal performance-wise and her car is newer and therefore presumably faster. (Charles also questioned whether a woman working as a waitress could afford such a high-end car, but maybe she bought it during her marriage and got title to it after the divorce.) From then on the film becomes a long series of car chases that reminded Charles of The French Connection and The Blues Brothers, as the antagonists end up causing accidents that include the flipping-over of another SUV, the near-death of a woman pedestrian who happens to get in their way, and the crushing to (apparent) death of a motorcycle cop who tries to get Karla to pull over and ends up being squeezed between her car and the Mustang. Karla finally reports the kidnapping of her son at a sheriff’s office and the bored Black deputy working the reception desk puts out an Amber Alert for the green, blue, teal or whatever-color-it-is Mustang — only in the meantime it’s been put out of commission after Karla ran it off the road and the kidnappers have stolen a black Volvo SUV to continue the chase.
Also Karla has actually met the kidnappers, a scrawny white guy named Terrence Tichy (Lew Temple) and his wife, a huge woman named Margo (Chris McGinn, who was in The Silence of the Lambs and has a surprisingly long credits list on imdb.com — one would think she’d be difficult to cast because of her enormous size, but she’s managed to keep working for almost three decades). Margo tells Karla that Terrence just wanted to kill her son Frankie, but Margo can persuade him to let Frankie go alive if Karla can come up with a $10,000 ransom. At one point Margo insists on getting into Karla’s car, where she sits in the back seat but then in the middle of the ride — which they’re presumably taking so Karla can drain her bank accounts and max out her credit cards to pay the ransom — Margo insists on grabbing the controls, giving new meaning to the phrase “back-seat driver,” until Karla manages to throw her out of the car and strand her. Then, after Karla has pushed the Mustang off the road but has run out of gas herself, she gets shot at by Terrence with a shotgun and a truck driver she was asking to help her gets blown away. At the police station where she reports a crime she sees a whole wall full of wanted posters for missing children — in one of the few genuinely poignant moments of the movie — and her heart sinks. One thing she has been able to do from the wreckage of the kidnappers’ Mustang is retrieve their I.D.’s, which tell her not only their names but also their address — and Karla ends up going there to find her son, only to play a cat-and-mouse game with the woman kidnapper (Karla had managed to kill Terrence with his own shotgun, but his wife doesn’t yet know he’s dead), calling on the Tichys’ cordless phone to the police. She finds her son but also two other kidnapped children, both girls, only she has to flee in a hurry when Margo retrieves her husband’s shotgun and sets a tracking dog on her to find where she and Frankie are hiding — only Margo accidentally kills the dog with the shotgun and Karla is able to kill Margo.
Then Karla attempts to free the other captives — only she’s set upon by another guy with a shotgun, the Tichys’ neighbor, who at first insists he’s known them for years and they would never do anything like that, then seems to switch sides and help rescue the kids still being held captive in the Tichy’s attic, only Karla realizes that he knows something she’s never told him — that there are two captives and they’re both girls — so she realizes he’s part of the human-trafficking ring that’s behind all this and was offering $100,000 for Frankie. Karla kills Frankie by walloping him with a shovel, the police finally arrive and rescue everybody, and we see a newscaster announcing that Karla’s brave actions have led to arrests of members of a widespread human-trafficking ring over several states. Kidnap is a genuinely exciting thriller — writer Knate Lee and director Luis Prieto knew exactly what they wanted to do to their audience, and did it — though there are an awful lot of plot holes and we’re all too aware of them even as we’re being swung like one of those tethered amusement-park balls from one thrill to the next. Halle Berry is effective in what’s basically a one-woman show, but the role doesn’t require her to do much but show an adrenaline-fueled panic and a single-minded determination to find and rescue her son no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts in the pursuit. One can see why this wasn’t a big theatrical hit, and if this is the sort of movie Relativity Media thought was sure-fire box-office gold it’s not surprising they went bankrupt, but Kidnap is at least a movie that accomplishes what it set out to do even though one could imagine a far richer, greater film being made of the same basic situation.
Last night’s Lifetime presentation was of a film called Kidnap, and they ballyhooed the presence of Halle Berry as star so relentlessly I had got the idea that Kidnap Starring Halle Berry was actually the film’s title. I had also assumed the movie was made for Lifetime, but it was a wanna-be theatrical release from a company called Relativity Media which raised money from investors by claiming they had a mathematical formula that would ensure long-term success and a steady stream of profits from an industry as inherently chancy as filmmaking. Alas, after a series of commercial bombs they were forced to declare bankruptcy in 2017 and the remaining films in their pipeline were sold to other studios. Kidnap is prefaced by the usual plethora of production company credits — Di Bonaventura Pictures, Gold Star Films, 606 Films — and casts Halle Berry as Louisiana resident Karla Dyson, who’s just gone through a divorce and is fighting her ex-husband for custody of their young son (he’s supposed to be 6 but looks more like 8 or 9) Frankie (Sage Correa) even though Frankie’s dad and dad’s new girlfriend both have professional jobs while Karla is barely scraping by as a waitress. In the opening scene she’s shown on the job getting into an argument with a couple of parents and their heavily spoiled young son about just what they will order, and Karla can’t help but mutter an insult to them even though that sort of thing could get her fired. Then she takes Frankie to a playground, only in the middle of their outing she has to take a phone call, she turns away from him, and when she turns back he’s gone.
Karla gets a glimpse of him being grabbed by a shadowy figure and pulled into a 1980’s Ford Mustang GT of indeterminate color — it’s described in the script as green but it looked teal blue to me — and she doesn’t get its license-plate number because it doesn’t appear to have one. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling the police on her cell phone, Karla decides to chase the Mustang on foot and actually grabs on to it, though of course nothing she does can stop the car (hey, Halle, when you made a DC Comics Universe movie you were Catwoman, not Wonder Woman!), so she gets into her own car, a red Chrysler Town Car SUV that has a hard time keeping up with the Mustang even though, as some imdb.com posters pointed out, the two are about equal performance-wise and her car is newer and therefore presumably faster. (Charles also questioned whether a woman working as a waitress could afford such a high-end car, but maybe she bought it during her marriage and got title to it after the divorce.) From then on the film becomes a long series of car chases that reminded Charles of The French Connection and The Blues Brothers, as the antagonists end up causing accidents that include the flipping-over of another SUV, the near-death of a woman pedestrian who happens to get in their way, and the crushing to (apparent) death of a motorcycle cop who tries to get Karla to pull over and ends up being squeezed between her car and the Mustang. Karla finally reports the kidnapping of her son at a sheriff’s office and the bored Black deputy working the reception desk puts out an Amber Alert for the green, blue, teal or whatever-color-it-is Mustang — only in the meantime it’s been put out of commission after Karla ran it off the road and the kidnappers have stolen a black Volvo SUV to continue the chase.
Also Karla has actually met the kidnappers, a scrawny white guy named Terrence Tichy (Lew Temple) and his wife, a huge woman named Margo (Chris McGinn, who was in The Silence of the Lambs and has a surprisingly long credits list on imdb.com — one would think she’d be difficult to cast because of her enormous size, but she’s managed to keep working for almost three decades). Margo tells Karla that Terrence just wanted to kill her son Frankie, but Margo can persuade him to let Frankie go alive if Karla can come up with a $10,000 ransom. At one point Margo insists on getting into Karla’s car, where she sits in the back seat but then in the middle of the ride — which they’re presumably taking so Karla can drain her bank accounts and max out her credit cards to pay the ransom — Margo insists on grabbing the controls, giving new meaning to the phrase “back-seat driver,” until Karla manages to throw her out of the car and strand her. Then, after Karla has pushed the Mustang off the road but has run out of gas herself, she gets shot at by Terrence with a shotgun and a truck driver she was asking to help her gets blown away. At the police station where she reports a crime she sees a whole wall full of wanted posters for missing children — in one of the few genuinely poignant moments of the movie — and her heart sinks. One thing she has been able to do from the wreckage of the kidnappers’ Mustang is retrieve their I.D.’s, which tell her not only their names but also their address — and Karla ends up going there to find her son, only to play a cat-and-mouse game with the woman kidnapper (Karla had managed to kill Terrence with his own shotgun, but his wife doesn’t yet know he’s dead), calling on the Tichys’ cordless phone to the police. She finds her son but also two other kidnapped children, both girls, only she has to flee in a hurry when Margo retrieves her husband’s shotgun and sets a tracking dog on her to find where she and Frankie are hiding — only Margo accidentally kills the dog with the shotgun and Karla is able to kill Margo.
Then Karla attempts to free the other captives — only she’s set upon by another guy with a shotgun, the Tichys’ neighbor, who at first insists he’s known them for years and they would never do anything like that, then seems to switch sides and help rescue the kids still being held captive in the Tichy’s attic, only Karla realizes that he knows something she’s never told him — that there are two captives and they’re both girls — so she realizes he’s part of the human-trafficking ring that’s behind all this and was offering $100,000 for Frankie. Karla kills Frankie by walloping him with a shovel, the police finally arrive and rescue everybody, and we see a newscaster announcing that Karla’s brave actions have led to arrests of members of a widespread human-trafficking ring over several states. Kidnap is a genuinely exciting thriller — writer Knate Lee and director Luis Prieto knew exactly what they wanted to do to their audience, and did it — though there are an awful lot of plot holes and we’re all too aware of them even as we’re being swung like one of those tethered amusement-park balls from one thrill to the next. Halle Berry is effective in what’s basically a one-woman show, but the role doesn’t require her to do much but show an adrenaline-fueled panic and a single-minded determination to find and rescue her son no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts in the pursuit. One can see why this wasn’t a big theatrical hit, and if this is the sort of movie Relativity Media thought was sure-fire box-office gold it’s not surprising they went bankrupt, but Kidnap is at least a movie that accomplishes what it set out to do even though one could imagine a far richer, greater film being made of the same basic situation.
Sunday, March 8, 2020
My Nightmare Landlord (The Asylum, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s two Lifetime movies were My Nightmare Landlord and Baby Monitor Murders, and though both were very much to the Lifetime “pussies in peril” (the phrase is New York Times critic Maureen Dowd’s) formula, My Nightmare Landlord was actually quite good. It was a product of The Asylum — a company that usually does ripoff movies of major-budget productions based either on public-domain stories (they rushed their own versions of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars ahead of the major versions of those stories by Spielberg and Disney, respectively) or concepts so obvious they couldn’t be copyrighted (they did a movie about people chasing ghosts called Ghosthunters and one about street racers called The Fast and the Fierce). This time writer Naomi L. Selfman and director Dylan Vox, both names new to me, came up with an “original” story in which Lydia Shaw (Caroline Harris) is a college student who has a work-study job at the school library (though it has a children’s section and services the general public as well; Charles questioned this but I figured the town it was in was so small the city government had decided not to maintain their own library but to contract with the university so non-affiliated people could use the library as well). She’s barely hanging on both to her academic career — her faculty advisor, Professor Moodley (Harwood Gordon) keeps rejecting her suggestions for papers on the ground that her topic is too broad and she needs to narrow her focus — and her job, at least in part because she’s also screwed up her personal life. She was living with a white boyfriend named Tim (Spencer Belko) who spent his spare time drinking, hanging out in bars and cruising other women, and he’s become so abusive she’s determined to leave him even though it will make her homeless and her only recourse is to sleep on the couch of her best friend Kaylee (Sinéad D’arcy) until she finds a place. She almost gets one in an apartment building run by a middle-aged Black woman when Tim, who’s followed her there, shows up, makes a scene and leads the Black manager to say, “This is a quiet building, we don’t need that kind of trouble here,” and tear up the draft lease.
She finally seems to luck out at another building run by a young, hunky white guy, Drew (Ignacyo Matynia), whom we first see topless as he’s in the middle of doing his own renovations on the building. The fact that Ignacyo Marynia is drop-dead gorgeous and superficially charming ought to be the dead giveaway that he’s not to be trusted — and the fact that the apartment Drew is showing Lydia is fully furnished and decorated because the woman who was living there before her just moved out and abandoned everything (Drew said it was to marry a rich guy and move in with him, but we think, “Yeah, right; he’s probably got her buried in his crawl space, or maybe his basement”) also ought to be a warning sign. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that she needs the apartment at all because she’s just left an abusive boyfriend who’s still stalking her (which I would think would make her more aware of the dangers of falling for a new guy), she naïvely takes Drew at face value. At face value he’s a charming man who’s literary (on finding out Lydia is an English major he starts spouting Hemingway trivia and expressing his desire to take a vacation to Italy and take her to Harry’s Bar from The Sun Also Rises) and a fun companion. But he also has her apartment bugged so he can snoop on her with video cameras connected to his laptop (including watching her in her bathtub, though both she and he take bubble baths so director Vox can avoid showing “naughty bits” — this movie has more bubble-bath scenes than anything made since the heyday of Jayne Mansfield), and when she innocently gives him her student paper and her renewal application for her financial aid, he doesn’t mail the aid application and somehow opens the envelope with a paper and keeps her cover sheet but substitutes an already published paper he downloaded online — which leads her to be accused of plagiarism and get threatened with being thrown out of the university.
He also goes into a hissy-fit when he sees Lydia with her teacher’s assistant Brad (André Beyer), a reasonably attractive Black man we find ourselves thinking she should be dating if only because she’s had rotten luck with white guys and it would seem to make sense for her to pick one of her own. Drew steals Lydia’s cell phone, uses it to send a text to Brad accusing him of sexual harassment and breaking off further contact, and then drops the phone into the water dish of Lydia’s cat Pumpkin so she’ll have to replace it and won’t be able to read the texts Drew sent impersonating her. The missing phone also gets Lydia fired from her library job when she shows up late because she didn’t get the text her boss, Lucia (Lucy Bowyer), sent rescheduling her an hour early. Also in the building is a middle-aged woman named Helen (Willow Hale) who’s suffering from some sort of age-related dementia —when we first meet her she’s trying to get into Lydia’s apartment, thinking it’s her own, and I joked, “Ah! It’s Joe Biden in drag!” — and whom Drew murders when she rats him out to Lydia, saying that he’s used his pass key to let himself in her apartment any time he feels like it. It ends with Drew binding Lydia and threatening to drown her in a bathtub (not another bathtub scene!) when the police respond to an incomplete 911 call and her friend Kaylee (ya remember Kaylee?) clues them to what’s going on and rescues her in time. The movie ends happily — Lydia gets her financial aid, her professor gets her real (and genuinely original) paper and gives her the paid internship she was hoping for so she won’t have to work at the library anymore, and Lydia and Kaylee lay plans to find their own apartment together. “Ah!” I joked. “Boy meets girl, boy turns out to be psycho, girl gets girl.”
Though My Nightmare Landlord isn’t that much of a departure from the usual Lifetime clichés, it’s actually quite well done: more than I do in most of these productions, I really identified with Lydia. It helps that both the leads are quite good actors: Caroline Harris is warm and human enough that we really identify with her and care about her plight, and Ignacyo Matynia manages to capture the complexity of his character, genuinely attractive, appealing and fun to be with when that bit of glare-ice in his head isn’t sending him skidding off the road into the possessive mania of the crazed stalker. He even manages to sound genuinely sorry in the final scene that he’s going to “have” to kill the woman he thought he was in love with, the woman he thought would make him complete. There’ve been a handful of performances over the years in which great actors played characters who did horrible things to women but managed even at the height of their murderous manias to remain charming — Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932); Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); John Carradine in Bluebeard (1944); Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960) — and though Matynia may not be in that exalted company it’s clear he’s managed the rare double balance of being charming and evil at the same time. Certainly it’s a lot easier in this film than in some of Lifetime’s other, similarly plotted productions to understand why the woman is genuinely attracted to him — even though, in one scene Naomi Selfman seems to have carefully constructed to keep Lydia from opening herself in the last and most irrevocable way to Drew (at least short of him killing her!), he has them make out and get horny but she draws back from the actual sex act … so at least she won’t have that psychological burden to worry about later. (Still, I can’t help but think how this movie might have worked if Lydia and Drew not only had had sex, but she’d got pregnant from it; it’s tempting to imagine the sequel that could have generated and the moral dilemma it would have put her in: have an abortion or raise her psycho ex’s child?)
Charles thought there was a theatrical movie from the late 1980’s or early 1990’s that had used the situation of a monster landlord or property manager putting the moves on a tenant and freaking out and making her life miserable when she turned him down — I had thought he was thinking of Pacific Heights (a film from 1991 Charles and I had seen together, though in that one it was the tenant from hell, Michael Keaton, driving crazy the people he rents a room from, Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) but the film he ultimately ran down was called Sliver, it was made in 1993 and starred Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenger in a story of (as imdb.com synopsized it) “a woman moves into an exclusive New York City apartment building, which she soon discovers houses tenants with all manner of shocking secrets.” It was based on a book by Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, and doesn’t really sound that much like My Nightmare Landlord (the title of Sliver comes from the film’s setting, one of those tall but ultra-narrow buildings in New York City that were designed to fit a weirdly shaped lot that had somehow become available), but it’s indicative of how obvious ideas get recycled throughout cinema history. Still, My Nightmare Landlord (despite its title, which seems to be working too hard to be frightening) has a rare level of humanity and emotional complexity that sets it more than a bit above the Lifetime norm.
Last night’s two Lifetime movies were My Nightmare Landlord and Baby Monitor Murders, and though both were very much to the Lifetime “pussies in peril” (the phrase is New York Times critic Maureen Dowd’s) formula, My Nightmare Landlord was actually quite good. It was a product of The Asylum — a company that usually does ripoff movies of major-budget productions based either on public-domain stories (they rushed their own versions of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars ahead of the major versions of those stories by Spielberg and Disney, respectively) or concepts so obvious they couldn’t be copyrighted (they did a movie about people chasing ghosts called Ghosthunters and one about street racers called The Fast and the Fierce). This time writer Naomi L. Selfman and director Dylan Vox, both names new to me, came up with an “original” story in which Lydia Shaw (Caroline Harris) is a college student who has a work-study job at the school library (though it has a children’s section and services the general public as well; Charles questioned this but I figured the town it was in was so small the city government had decided not to maintain their own library but to contract with the university so non-affiliated people could use the library as well). She’s barely hanging on both to her academic career — her faculty advisor, Professor Moodley (Harwood Gordon) keeps rejecting her suggestions for papers on the ground that her topic is too broad and she needs to narrow her focus — and her job, at least in part because she’s also screwed up her personal life. She was living with a white boyfriend named Tim (Spencer Belko) who spent his spare time drinking, hanging out in bars and cruising other women, and he’s become so abusive she’s determined to leave him even though it will make her homeless and her only recourse is to sleep on the couch of her best friend Kaylee (Sinéad D’arcy) until she finds a place. She almost gets one in an apartment building run by a middle-aged Black woman when Tim, who’s followed her there, shows up, makes a scene and leads the Black manager to say, “This is a quiet building, we don’t need that kind of trouble here,” and tear up the draft lease.
She finally seems to luck out at another building run by a young, hunky white guy, Drew (Ignacyo Matynia), whom we first see topless as he’s in the middle of doing his own renovations on the building. The fact that Ignacyo Marynia is drop-dead gorgeous and superficially charming ought to be the dead giveaway that he’s not to be trusted — and the fact that the apartment Drew is showing Lydia is fully furnished and decorated because the woman who was living there before her just moved out and abandoned everything (Drew said it was to marry a rich guy and move in with him, but we think, “Yeah, right; he’s probably got her buried in his crawl space, or maybe his basement”) also ought to be a warning sign. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that she needs the apartment at all because she’s just left an abusive boyfriend who’s still stalking her (which I would think would make her more aware of the dangers of falling for a new guy), she naïvely takes Drew at face value. At face value he’s a charming man who’s literary (on finding out Lydia is an English major he starts spouting Hemingway trivia and expressing his desire to take a vacation to Italy and take her to Harry’s Bar from The Sun Also Rises) and a fun companion. But he also has her apartment bugged so he can snoop on her with video cameras connected to his laptop (including watching her in her bathtub, though both she and he take bubble baths so director Vox can avoid showing “naughty bits” — this movie has more bubble-bath scenes than anything made since the heyday of Jayne Mansfield), and when she innocently gives him her student paper and her renewal application for her financial aid, he doesn’t mail the aid application and somehow opens the envelope with a paper and keeps her cover sheet but substitutes an already published paper he downloaded online — which leads her to be accused of plagiarism and get threatened with being thrown out of the university.
He also goes into a hissy-fit when he sees Lydia with her teacher’s assistant Brad (André Beyer), a reasonably attractive Black man we find ourselves thinking she should be dating if only because she’s had rotten luck with white guys and it would seem to make sense for her to pick one of her own. Drew steals Lydia’s cell phone, uses it to send a text to Brad accusing him of sexual harassment and breaking off further contact, and then drops the phone into the water dish of Lydia’s cat Pumpkin so she’ll have to replace it and won’t be able to read the texts Drew sent impersonating her. The missing phone also gets Lydia fired from her library job when she shows up late because she didn’t get the text her boss, Lucia (Lucy Bowyer), sent rescheduling her an hour early. Also in the building is a middle-aged woman named Helen (Willow Hale) who’s suffering from some sort of age-related dementia —when we first meet her she’s trying to get into Lydia’s apartment, thinking it’s her own, and I joked, “Ah! It’s Joe Biden in drag!” — and whom Drew murders when she rats him out to Lydia, saying that he’s used his pass key to let himself in her apartment any time he feels like it. It ends with Drew binding Lydia and threatening to drown her in a bathtub (not another bathtub scene!) when the police respond to an incomplete 911 call and her friend Kaylee (ya remember Kaylee?) clues them to what’s going on and rescues her in time. The movie ends happily — Lydia gets her financial aid, her professor gets her real (and genuinely original) paper and gives her the paid internship she was hoping for so she won’t have to work at the library anymore, and Lydia and Kaylee lay plans to find their own apartment together. “Ah!” I joked. “Boy meets girl, boy turns out to be psycho, girl gets girl.”
Though My Nightmare Landlord isn’t that much of a departure from the usual Lifetime clichés, it’s actually quite well done: more than I do in most of these productions, I really identified with Lydia. It helps that both the leads are quite good actors: Caroline Harris is warm and human enough that we really identify with her and care about her plight, and Ignacyo Matynia manages to capture the complexity of his character, genuinely attractive, appealing and fun to be with when that bit of glare-ice in his head isn’t sending him skidding off the road into the possessive mania of the crazed stalker. He even manages to sound genuinely sorry in the final scene that he’s going to “have” to kill the woman he thought he was in love with, the woman he thought would make him complete. There’ve been a handful of performances over the years in which great actors played characters who did horrible things to women but managed even at the height of their murderous manias to remain charming — Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932); Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); John Carradine in Bluebeard (1944); Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960) — and though Matynia may not be in that exalted company it’s clear he’s managed the rare double balance of being charming and evil at the same time. Certainly it’s a lot easier in this film than in some of Lifetime’s other, similarly plotted productions to understand why the woman is genuinely attracted to him — even though, in one scene Naomi Selfman seems to have carefully constructed to keep Lydia from opening herself in the last and most irrevocable way to Drew (at least short of him killing her!), he has them make out and get horny but she draws back from the actual sex act … so at least she won’t have that psychological burden to worry about later. (Still, I can’t help but think how this movie might have worked if Lydia and Drew not only had had sex, but she’d got pregnant from it; it’s tempting to imagine the sequel that could have generated and the moral dilemma it would have put her in: have an abortion or raise her psycho ex’s child?)
Charles thought there was a theatrical movie from the late 1980’s or early 1990’s that had used the situation of a monster landlord or property manager putting the moves on a tenant and freaking out and making her life miserable when she turned him down — I had thought he was thinking of Pacific Heights (a film from 1991 Charles and I had seen together, though in that one it was the tenant from hell, Michael Keaton, driving crazy the people he rents a room from, Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) but the film he ultimately ran down was called Sliver, it was made in 1993 and starred Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenger in a story of (as imdb.com synopsized it) “a woman moves into an exclusive New York City apartment building, which she soon discovers houses tenants with all manner of shocking secrets.” It was based on a book by Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, and doesn’t really sound that much like My Nightmare Landlord (the title of Sliver comes from the film’s setting, one of those tall but ultra-narrow buildings in New York City that were designed to fit a weirdly shaped lot that had somehow become available), but it’s indicative of how obvious ideas get recycled throughout cinema history. Still, My Nightmare Landlord (despite its title, which seems to be working too hard to be frightening) has a rare level of humanity and emotional complexity that sets it more than a bit above the Lifetime norm.
Baby Monitor Murders (My Life Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after the warmth and humanity of My Nightmare Landlord, Lifetime’s next feature, Baby Monitor Murders, was a return to the dullness and slovenliness of the network’s usual fare. First off, the title is risible; it was originally shot under the title The Babysitter, which in one way would have been better but would probably misled audience members to expect a story about a psycho babysitter coming into the home of a normal family, ingratiating herself with their child and plotting to kidnap the kid and/or kill the mother out of the delusion that she and the father were “made for each other” and anyone who got in the way deserved to die. Instead of that set of Lifetime clichés, though, it was the set of Lifetime clichés in which the innocent babysitter stumbles into a murder plot and starts to become convinced that the father of the child she’s babysitting may have killed the mother. The babysitter is Cassie Temple (Natalie Sharp), an aspiring rock musician — apparently Natalie Sharp has some real-life reputation as a singer-songwriter in her native Canada, though what we hear of her music (a few desultory picked-out songs on a guitar and some off-key singing of them) leads the audience (this member of it, anyway) to think she should give up any thoughts of rock stardom and settle into a normal job. The fact that Natalie Sharp doesn’t look like a woman rock star —she’s heavy-set and if she dyed her long brown hair black and put all that smoky eye shadow around her eyes she’d be a good choice for a biopic of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — doesn’t help her credibility either. Anyway, she was hoping to spend her summer vacation from college in Los Angeles working in an internship for a big-time music producer, but at the last minute the funding for it fell through (of course I joked, “He really got sued by a woman for sexual harassment, got exposed by #MeToo, and had to pay a huge settlement, so you’re luckier that you didn’t end up working for him!”), so she’s stuck in the little town in which she grew up and her parents still live.
Only the quiet little town isn’t so quiet anymore; we’ve seen a prologue set in twilight in which a woman is being chased through the woods. We don’t see who’s chasing her but it’s clear she’s in mortal danger, and when the main part of the movie turns up we find that her name is — or was — Mallory Raymond (Cassandra Ebner), and her husband Glenn Raymond (Dustin Lloyd), a tall, fierce redhead with a full beard (unusually for a Lifetime movie, all three of the male leads have beards), is angry at the police for having done so little to find her. Then Cassie, Our Heroine, gets hired by Tom Paine (Jon Cor) — they gave the character the same name as the famous pamphleteer and propagandist for the American Revolution — and his wife Chloe (Nicole LaPlaca) to baby-sit their daughter Becca (Emma Oliver). Cassie settles into her new job and Becca takes to her. So does her dad; though at least this time around writer Emily Golden and director Danny J. Boyle (an old Lifetime hand) don’t suggest that Tom Paine has the hots for his new, young, nubile (if a bit on the Zaftig side, especially by today’s standards) babysitter and is willing to murder his wife for her, they do have Chloe disappear under circumstances similar to Mallory Raymond’s. The usual dumb cop, Sheriff Hayes (Blake Stadel), leaps to the conclusion that Chloe is dead, killed similarly to Mallory, and her husband Tom committed both murders. Then a seeming deus ex machina comes into the action in the form of Dr. Jim Gideon (Brendan Taylor), Chloe’s therapist and the sort of tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime usually casts as the innocent husband — only when he summons Chloe for a meeting and tells her that he can’t say what Chloe told him because that would violate doctor-patient confidentiality, he drops an awful lot of hints against Tom Paine. The moment Dr. Gideon showed up, all dripping with phony solicitousness and concern that barely masked his twitchiness, it almost immediately became apparent (though my husband Charles caught it before I did) that he’s the real killer, though his motive doesn’t become apparent until he traps Cassie in his home and locks her in his basement.
While there she discovers the dead and badly decomposed body of Mallory Raymond, the still-living (but barely) Chloe Paine, and the secret, which was that Dr. Gideon (like a number of other therapists in previous Lifetime movies) got tired of hearing all his married clients talk about their relationship problems when at least they had relationships, while he was single and came home at the end of the day to an empty house. What fueled his psychotic rage was Chloe Paine’s revelation in her therapy sessions that her husband Tom was having an affair with Mallory Raymond. Dr. Gideon decided that Tom didn’t deserve Chloe and that he was going to woo her himself, first by offing her husband’s paramour, then kidnapping her but keeping her alive, and setting Tom up to take the fall so he’d be either imprisoned, executed or shot to death in one of the final shoot-outs beloved by Lifetime writers, so he could become Chloe’s husband and Becca’s father. In the end Dr. Gideon becomes that rare Lifetime villain that’s taken alive rather than killed, Tom, Chloe and Becca are reconciled, Glenn Raymond (who in some respects is the most interesting character in the movie and is played by its sexiest actor!) is absolved of the lingering suspicions that he killed his wife, and the final sequence shows Cassie driving into Los Angeles to pursue her music career (though, as I said before, given what we’ve seen and heard of her “music” before this we really don’t hold out much hope that she’ll make it to stardom). A product of old Lifetime pros (including two of the four “executive producers,” Tom Berry and Breanne Hartley) and nowhere near as interesting as My Nightmare Landlord (which was made by people new to the Lifetime orbit, even though a familiar distribution company, Reel One Entertainment, sold it to Lifetime), Baby Monitor Murders (named for a brief scene in which the “baby monitor,” an Alexa-like speaker that’s supposed to alert Cassie if anything is wrong in Becca’s room, gets its wires crossed and we hear an unidentified male voice plotting something sinister — shades of Lucile Fletcher’s legendary radio play, later a movie, Sorry, Wrong Number!) is O.K. entertainment and not as embarrassingly bad or silly as some Lifetime movies have been, but it doesn’t have the relative emotional richness and compassion of My Nightmare Landlord either.
Alas, after the warmth and humanity of My Nightmare Landlord, Lifetime’s next feature, Baby Monitor Murders, was a return to the dullness and slovenliness of the network’s usual fare. First off, the title is risible; it was originally shot under the title The Babysitter, which in one way would have been better but would probably misled audience members to expect a story about a psycho babysitter coming into the home of a normal family, ingratiating herself with their child and plotting to kidnap the kid and/or kill the mother out of the delusion that she and the father were “made for each other” and anyone who got in the way deserved to die. Instead of that set of Lifetime clichés, though, it was the set of Lifetime clichés in which the innocent babysitter stumbles into a murder plot and starts to become convinced that the father of the child she’s babysitting may have killed the mother. The babysitter is Cassie Temple (Natalie Sharp), an aspiring rock musician — apparently Natalie Sharp has some real-life reputation as a singer-songwriter in her native Canada, though what we hear of her music (a few desultory picked-out songs on a guitar and some off-key singing of them) leads the audience (this member of it, anyway) to think she should give up any thoughts of rock stardom and settle into a normal job. The fact that Natalie Sharp doesn’t look like a woman rock star —she’s heavy-set and if she dyed her long brown hair black and put all that smoky eye shadow around her eyes she’d be a good choice for a biopic of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — doesn’t help her credibility either. Anyway, she was hoping to spend her summer vacation from college in Los Angeles working in an internship for a big-time music producer, but at the last minute the funding for it fell through (of course I joked, “He really got sued by a woman for sexual harassment, got exposed by #MeToo, and had to pay a huge settlement, so you’re luckier that you didn’t end up working for him!”), so she’s stuck in the little town in which she grew up and her parents still live.
Only the quiet little town isn’t so quiet anymore; we’ve seen a prologue set in twilight in which a woman is being chased through the woods. We don’t see who’s chasing her but it’s clear she’s in mortal danger, and when the main part of the movie turns up we find that her name is — or was — Mallory Raymond (Cassandra Ebner), and her husband Glenn Raymond (Dustin Lloyd), a tall, fierce redhead with a full beard (unusually for a Lifetime movie, all three of the male leads have beards), is angry at the police for having done so little to find her. Then Cassie, Our Heroine, gets hired by Tom Paine (Jon Cor) — they gave the character the same name as the famous pamphleteer and propagandist for the American Revolution — and his wife Chloe (Nicole LaPlaca) to baby-sit their daughter Becca (Emma Oliver). Cassie settles into her new job and Becca takes to her. So does her dad; though at least this time around writer Emily Golden and director Danny J. Boyle (an old Lifetime hand) don’t suggest that Tom Paine has the hots for his new, young, nubile (if a bit on the Zaftig side, especially by today’s standards) babysitter and is willing to murder his wife for her, they do have Chloe disappear under circumstances similar to Mallory Raymond’s. The usual dumb cop, Sheriff Hayes (Blake Stadel), leaps to the conclusion that Chloe is dead, killed similarly to Mallory, and her husband Tom committed both murders. Then a seeming deus ex machina comes into the action in the form of Dr. Jim Gideon (Brendan Taylor), Chloe’s therapist and the sort of tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime usually casts as the innocent husband — only when he summons Chloe for a meeting and tells her that he can’t say what Chloe told him because that would violate doctor-patient confidentiality, he drops an awful lot of hints against Tom Paine. The moment Dr. Gideon showed up, all dripping with phony solicitousness and concern that barely masked his twitchiness, it almost immediately became apparent (though my husband Charles caught it before I did) that he’s the real killer, though his motive doesn’t become apparent until he traps Cassie in his home and locks her in his basement.
While there she discovers the dead and badly decomposed body of Mallory Raymond, the still-living (but barely) Chloe Paine, and the secret, which was that Dr. Gideon (like a number of other therapists in previous Lifetime movies) got tired of hearing all his married clients talk about their relationship problems when at least they had relationships, while he was single and came home at the end of the day to an empty house. What fueled his psychotic rage was Chloe Paine’s revelation in her therapy sessions that her husband Tom was having an affair with Mallory Raymond. Dr. Gideon decided that Tom didn’t deserve Chloe and that he was going to woo her himself, first by offing her husband’s paramour, then kidnapping her but keeping her alive, and setting Tom up to take the fall so he’d be either imprisoned, executed or shot to death in one of the final shoot-outs beloved by Lifetime writers, so he could become Chloe’s husband and Becca’s father. In the end Dr. Gideon becomes that rare Lifetime villain that’s taken alive rather than killed, Tom, Chloe and Becca are reconciled, Glenn Raymond (who in some respects is the most interesting character in the movie and is played by its sexiest actor!) is absolved of the lingering suspicions that he killed his wife, and the final sequence shows Cassie driving into Los Angeles to pursue her music career (though, as I said before, given what we’ve seen and heard of her “music” before this we really don’t hold out much hope that she’ll make it to stardom). A product of old Lifetime pros (including two of the four “executive producers,” Tom Berry and Breanne Hartley) and nowhere near as interesting as My Nightmare Landlord (which was made by people new to the Lifetime orbit, even though a familiar distribution company, Reel One Entertainment, sold it to Lifetime), Baby Monitor Murders (named for a brief scene in which the “baby monitor,” an Alexa-like speaker that’s supposed to alert Cassie if anything is wrong in Becca’s room, gets its wires crossed and we hear an unidentified male voice plotting something sinister — shades of Lucile Fletcher’s legendary radio play, later a movie, Sorry, Wrong Number!) is O.K. entertainment and not as embarrassingly bad or silly as some Lifetime movies have been, but it doesn’t have the relative emotional richness and compassion of My Nightmare Landlord either.
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Game of Thrones, season 3, episodes 9 and 10: “The Rains of Castamere,” "Mhysa” (Television 360, Startling, Bighead Littlehead, Home Box Office, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the last two episodes of season three of Game of Thrones — and once again I can see why a lot of people “binge-watched” this show, either on DVD’s or streaming, because it takes a while to remember where the locations are, who these people are (since this is a medievalist fantasy just about everyone except the people in the very top brackets of society wears crude clothes, mostly furs, and are dirty all the time), which sides of the various conflicts they’re on and what they’re actually doing, let alone why. The episodes were called “The Rains of Castamere” and “Mhysa,” and are summarized on imdb.com as follows: “Robb and Catelyn arrive at the Twins for the wedding. Jon is put to the test to see where his loyalties truly lie. Bran's group decides to split up. Daenerys plans an invasion of Yunkai. … Bran and company travel beyond the Wall. Sam returns to Castle Black. Jon says goodbye to Ygritte. Jaime returns to King's Landing. The Night’s Watch asks for help from Stannis.” In case you were wondering, Robb Stark (Richard Madden) is the legitimate heir on the Stark side of the battle between Lannisters (read: Lancasters) and Starks (read: Yorks) at the heart of much of Game of Thrones; Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) is his wife (I think)/
Bran is the boy prince who caught his elder brother and his elder sister screwing each other, was pitched out of the tower where he caught them, took a header of about 50 feet or so and ended up disabled (though in these episodes he’s developed a superpower: he’s able to “freeze” attackers, human or animal, by mental will power alone, though he doesn’t have full control over this and sometimes it doesn’t work); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) is the rebel queen from across the “Narrow Sea” (which I supposed meant the Irish Sea but Charles thinks it’s the English channel, and the land across from it where Daenerys is stranded for lack of ships to get across and fight for power in “Westeros,” i.e. England, is a George R. R. Martin conflation of continental Europe and the Middle East, since we’ve got people who look like Scythians and Saracens as well as a smattering of Blacks); Sam (John Bradley) — full name: Samwell Tarly — is the heavy-set character who in the early going seemed just like your typical comic-relief character (when he trained for the Night’s Watch, the group of volunteer soldiers who guard the wall of ice separating Westeros from the North and the “White Walkers,” homicidal ghosts not that different from the zombies in the George Romero films) — but develops some heroic characteristics when he accidentally discovers the “dragon blades,” which look like ordinary obsidian cave-people’s tools to us but are made of a magical material that can literally shatter a White Walker’s body when it’s thrust into one — and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is Robb Stark’s illegitimate half-brother, who was exiled to the Night’s Watch but broke his vow of celibacy by falling in love with his prisoner Ygritte — whose “farewell” to him at the end of “Mhysa” consists of shooting three arrows into him and leaving him for dead, though he manages to ride back to Castle Black, the last redoubt of the Night’s Watch.
The “Stannis” they’re asking for help from is Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), uncle (I think) of the current King Joffrey Baratheon (though he’s really not a Baratheon — the murdered King married a Lannister and she was the sister who had a Walküre-like affair with her brother, only instead of producing Siegfried they created Joffrey, a psychopathic nerd reminiscent of ancient Rome’s “bad Emperors” like Caligula or Nero — either of which would be good roles for Jack Gleeson, who plays Joffrey as a great and fun-to-watch super-villain) who considers himself the rightful heir and wants to deliver Westeros from Joffrey’s homicidal madness. At the end of “Mhysa” we also get to see another scene with Daenerys and her dragons, three beasts she created when she got 300-year-old dragons’ eggs to hatch and who — though they’re hardly big enough for humans to ride the way Anne McCaffrey’s dragons of Pern are — are still mightily impressive and dangerous fighters whose very presence and obvious bloodthirst have enabled Daenerys and the armies she’s been able to recruit by capturing slave populations and offering them their freedom. At least the two sexiest guys on this show, Jon and the new knight Daenerys signed up at the end of episode eight when he was assigned by the leaders of the city of Yunkai to kill her but decided he wanted to fuck her instead, end up these episodes still relatively good-looking and with all their parts intact — hot guys on this show tend to end up losing their hands or their dicks. I’m not exactly enjoying Game of Thrones, but it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon and has some good and witty lines and sequences even though the relentless successions of bloodbaths, loveless sexual couplings, and dingy scenes in forests tend to get a bit wearing at times!
Last night Charles and I watched the last two episodes of season three of Game of Thrones — and once again I can see why a lot of people “binge-watched” this show, either on DVD’s or streaming, because it takes a while to remember where the locations are, who these people are (since this is a medievalist fantasy just about everyone except the people in the very top brackets of society wears crude clothes, mostly furs, and are dirty all the time), which sides of the various conflicts they’re on and what they’re actually doing, let alone why. The episodes were called “The Rains of Castamere” and “Mhysa,” and are summarized on imdb.com as follows: “Robb and Catelyn arrive at the Twins for the wedding. Jon is put to the test to see where his loyalties truly lie. Bran's group decides to split up. Daenerys plans an invasion of Yunkai. … Bran and company travel beyond the Wall. Sam returns to Castle Black. Jon says goodbye to Ygritte. Jaime returns to King's Landing. The Night’s Watch asks for help from Stannis.” In case you were wondering, Robb Stark (Richard Madden) is the legitimate heir on the Stark side of the battle between Lannisters (read: Lancasters) and Starks (read: Yorks) at the heart of much of Game of Thrones; Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) is his wife (I think)/
Bran is the boy prince who caught his elder brother and his elder sister screwing each other, was pitched out of the tower where he caught them, took a header of about 50 feet or so and ended up disabled (though in these episodes he’s developed a superpower: he’s able to “freeze” attackers, human or animal, by mental will power alone, though he doesn’t have full control over this and sometimes it doesn’t work); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) is the rebel queen from across the “Narrow Sea” (which I supposed meant the Irish Sea but Charles thinks it’s the English channel, and the land across from it where Daenerys is stranded for lack of ships to get across and fight for power in “Westeros,” i.e. England, is a George R. R. Martin conflation of continental Europe and the Middle East, since we’ve got people who look like Scythians and Saracens as well as a smattering of Blacks); Sam (John Bradley) — full name: Samwell Tarly — is the heavy-set character who in the early going seemed just like your typical comic-relief character (when he trained for the Night’s Watch, the group of volunteer soldiers who guard the wall of ice separating Westeros from the North and the “White Walkers,” homicidal ghosts not that different from the zombies in the George Romero films) — but develops some heroic characteristics when he accidentally discovers the “dragon blades,” which look like ordinary obsidian cave-people’s tools to us but are made of a magical material that can literally shatter a White Walker’s body when it’s thrust into one — and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is Robb Stark’s illegitimate half-brother, who was exiled to the Night’s Watch but broke his vow of celibacy by falling in love with his prisoner Ygritte — whose “farewell” to him at the end of “Mhysa” consists of shooting three arrows into him and leaving him for dead, though he manages to ride back to Castle Black, the last redoubt of the Night’s Watch.
The “Stannis” they’re asking for help from is Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), uncle (I think) of the current King Joffrey Baratheon (though he’s really not a Baratheon — the murdered King married a Lannister and she was the sister who had a Walküre-like affair with her brother, only instead of producing Siegfried they created Joffrey, a psychopathic nerd reminiscent of ancient Rome’s “bad Emperors” like Caligula or Nero — either of which would be good roles for Jack Gleeson, who plays Joffrey as a great and fun-to-watch super-villain) who considers himself the rightful heir and wants to deliver Westeros from Joffrey’s homicidal madness. At the end of “Mhysa” we also get to see another scene with Daenerys and her dragons, three beasts she created when she got 300-year-old dragons’ eggs to hatch and who — though they’re hardly big enough for humans to ride the way Anne McCaffrey’s dragons of Pern are — are still mightily impressive and dangerous fighters whose very presence and obvious bloodthirst have enabled Daenerys and the armies she’s been able to recruit by capturing slave populations and offering them their freedom. At least the two sexiest guys on this show, Jon and the new knight Daenerys signed up at the end of episode eight when he was assigned by the leaders of the city of Yunkai to kill her but decided he wanted to fuck her instead, end up these episodes still relatively good-looking and with all their parts intact — hot guys on this show tend to end up losing their hands or their dicks. I’m not exactly enjoying Game of Thrones, but it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon and has some good and witty lines and sequences even though the relentless successions of bloodbaths, loveless sexual couplings, and dingy scenes in forests tend to get a bit wearing at times!
Checkmate: “The Human Factor” (Jamco Productions, Revue Productions, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Game of Thrones Charles and I watched another download of a TV show featuring Peter Lorre: “The Human Factor,” a quite engaging episode of a quirky TV series called Checkmate, filmed by Revue Productions (the subsidiary of the giant Music Corporation of America, or MCA, agency founded in the 1950’s to produce specifically for television) and aired for two seasons, from fall 1960 to spring 1962. Basically Checkmate is Nero Wolfe meets Route 66: two young men from San Francisco, Don Corey (Anthony George) and Jed Sills (Doug McClure), run a high-end private detective agency, but the real work seems to be done by their Nero Wolfe-esque criminological consultant, Dr. Carl Hyatt (Sebastian Cabot). Lorre appears in this one as master criminal Alonzo Pace Graham — we’re never told just what crimes he committed but they were serious enough to earn him a 15-year stretch in prison from which he’s just got out and hatched a revenge plot against Hyatt that involves hiring a similarly built confederate to impersonate Hyatt (I wasn’t sure whether the impostor was also played by Sebastian Cabot, though it seems likely) and also engaging a much-married widow named Helena Quattrell to seduce Hyatt (the real one). The plot consists of having Helena Quattrell disappear and her blood turn up on Hyatt’s clothes (courtesy of a syringe Alonzo stuck in her to draw out the blood so he could plant it), while she’s reported missing by her friend Fay Razon (Rebecca Welles — when I saw that name on the credits I wondered if she was the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, but that Rebecca Welles would have only been a teenager when this was made and this was a different Rebecca Welles, born February 5, 1928, and at the time this show was made she was the wife of Don Weis, who directed it), who’s also in on Alonzo’s plot, though ultimately the two young boys running the detective agency and looking like they couldn’t find their way out of a hole even if they’d been the one to dig it, along with the real Hyatt, figure it all out and Alonzo is arrested again. This was an engaging show even though it could have used stronger actors in the two young leads, and it’s a pity Sebastian Cabot didn’t get engaged to play the real Nero Wolfe. Alas, after selling two Nero Wolfe stories to Columbia in the late-1930’s — Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936 and The League of Frightened Men in 1937 — Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, was so upset at the miscasting of Walter Connolly as Wolfe in the second film that he decided to pull the rights and never again allow the Wolfe stories to be filmed (though a short-lived TV series with William Conrad, also not a good choice, was made later after Stout died), so Sydney Greenstreet, who would have been absolutely perfect for the role, got to play Nero Wolfe on radio but never in a movie; and Sebastian Cabot, who wouldn’t have fit the part as perfectly as Greenstreet but would still have been an inspired choice, didn’t either even though his role here shows how right for it he would have been! It’s also worth noting that the composer for this show was “Johnny Williams” — a young man who has since shortened his first name to John Williams and become one of the most popular and most honored film-score composers of all time!
After Game of Thrones Charles and I watched another download of a TV show featuring Peter Lorre: “The Human Factor,” a quite engaging episode of a quirky TV series called Checkmate, filmed by Revue Productions (the subsidiary of the giant Music Corporation of America, or MCA, agency founded in the 1950’s to produce specifically for television) and aired for two seasons, from fall 1960 to spring 1962. Basically Checkmate is Nero Wolfe meets Route 66: two young men from San Francisco, Don Corey (Anthony George) and Jed Sills (Doug McClure), run a high-end private detective agency, but the real work seems to be done by their Nero Wolfe-esque criminological consultant, Dr. Carl Hyatt (Sebastian Cabot). Lorre appears in this one as master criminal Alonzo Pace Graham — we’re never told just what crimes he committed but they were serious enough to earn him a 15-year stretch in prison from which he’s just got out and hatched a revenge plot against Hyatt that involves hiring a similarly built confederate to impersonate Hyatt (I wasn’t sure whether the impostor was also played by Sebastian Cabot, though it seems likely) and also engaging a much-married widow named Helena Quattrell to seduce Hyatt (the real one). The plot consists of having Helena Quattrell disappear and her blood turn up on Hyatt’s clothes (courtesy of a syringe Alonzo stuck in her to draw out the blood so he could plant it), while she’s reported missing by her friend Fay Razon (Rebecca Welles — when I saw that name on the credits I wondered if she was the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, but that Rebecca Welles would have only been a teenager when this was made and this was a different Rebecca Welles, born February 5, 1928, and at the time this show was made she was the wife of Don Weis, who directed it), who’s also in on Alonzo’s plot, though ultimately the two young boys running the detective agency and looking like they couldn’t find their way out of a hole even if they’d been the one to dig it, along with the real Hyatt, figure it all out and Alonzo is arrested again. This was an engaging show even though it could have used stronger actors in the two young leads, and it’s a pity Sebastian Cabot didn’t get engaged to play the real Nero Wolfe. Alas, after selling two Nero Wolfe stories to Columbia in the late-1930’s — Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936 and The League of Frightened Men in 1937 — Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, was so upset at the miscasting of Walter Connolly as Wolfe in the second film that he decided to pull the rights and never again allow the Wolfe stories to be filmed (though a short-lived TV series with William Conrad, also not a good choice, was made later after Stout died), so Sydney Greenstreet, who would have been absolutely perfect for the role, got to play Nero Wolfe on radio but never in a movie; and Sebastian Cabot, who wouldn’t have fit the part as perfectly as Greenstreet but would still have been an inspired choice, didn’t either even though his role here shows how right for it he would have been! It’s also worth noting that the composer for this show was “Johnny Williams” — a young man who has since shortened his first name to John Williams and become one of the most popular and most honored film-score composers of all time!
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