Monday, April 24, 2017

The Psycho She Met Online (Reel One Entertainment, NB Thrilling Films, Thrill Films, Lifetime, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime ran two “Premiere” movies — unusually given that it was Sunday instead of Saturday, the night they usually reserve for these sorts of shows — including one called The Psycho She Met Online which, despite its formula title, I had hopes for because Christine Conradt was the screenwriter and her frequent collaborator, Curtis James Crawford, was the director. Alas, this time around Conradt put all too little flesh on the bones of her (and Lifetime’s) usual formula. This time the heroine is Karen Hexley (Chelsea Hobbs), an emergency medical technician (EMT) in Philadelphia who makes national headlines when the man whose life she saves after he’s involved in a car accident is her husband Andrew (Matthew Lawrence, who for some reason wears his hair long in a “do” that makes him look like Caitlyn Jenner immediately before her final transition), even though she hadn’t known when she went out on the call that the victim would indeed be he. The titular psycho she’s going to meet online is Miranda Breyers (Charity Shea — inevitably I find myself wondering if she has sisters named Faith and Hope), who answers Karen’s ad to rent out her spare room on “Vacay ’n’ Stay,” a fictitious Web site obviously patterned on Airbnb — yes, it’s Lifetime’s latest attempt to keep up with the times and plug their familiar formulae into the world of smartphones and apps. Having already given us a rapist who meets his victims by being an Uber driver, now they have a psycho locating her victim via Airbnb (or something very much like it). Of course, one key element of the formula is that the heroine has to have a best friend who cottons onto the game the psycho is really playing even as she poses as nice ’n’ perky to win the heroine’s trust — though in this story that role is split between two people. One is Aubrey Hunt (Alexis Maitland), Karen’s sorority “sister” from college — with whom she’s sustained a strong relationship since she was (at least as far as she knows) an only child and never had a real biological sister — and the other is her other “Vacay ’n’ Stay” tenant, a charming old British nature photographer named Evander Swanson (Robert Welch) whom Miranda ambushes and kills because he’s getting too nosy about her and her background and she’s worried he will find her out.

Exactly what there is to find out about her remains a mystery: when we first meet Miranda she’s in Portland, Oregon, living with a creepy layabout boyfriend who bears a striking resemblance to the late Kurt Cobain, only without the scraggly beard, and when he tries to keep her from leaving she kicks him in the balls until he falls down, then kicks him again with the stiletto heel of one of her shoes (which, it’s later established, she stole from a store and did a three-month jail sentence for shoplifting) and walks out. Her departure for Philadelphia, where the main part of the story takes place, is explained by her seeing a story about Karen Hexley saving her husband’s life on the Internet, and at first we (or at least I) think she recognized Andrew as a former boyfriend and wanted revenge on the woman who took him away from her. When Miranda shows up in Philadelphia and “randomly” answers Karen’s Vacay ’n’ Stay ad, she’s as sweet as can be at first but also awesomely possessive about Karen, to the point of bugging her bedroom with a video camera (one wonders if she’s interested in eavesdropping while Karen and Andrew are having sex, but as it turns out that’s about the last of her concerns) and going into a jealous hissy-fit when she sees how closely bonded Karen and her sorority sister Aubrey are. Miranda — who tells Karen she’s working as a personal trainer but is actually a stripper — also sets out to seduce Andrew’s brother Tyler (Yani Gellman, to my mind considerably cuter than Matthew Lawrence!), apparently as a means of bonding ever closer to Karen’s family, since she’s already told Karen that she’s her half-sister — Karen’s mom had an affair with Miranda’s dad while still married to Karen’s dad. We’re half-expecting that Karen will find that Miranda is lying about that, but as things turn out that’s the one thing Miranda says about her background that’s actually true — when Karen’s dad found out that his wife was pregnant by another man he agreed to take her back but only on condition that she put the baby up for adoption, and as a result Miranda was raised by another family and the adoption records were kept secret until a recent change in the law opened them, whereupon Miranda traced her mom to an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico. The story Miranda told Karen was that mom committed suicide when her cancer was so advanced she was going to die anyway — but in fact Miranda killed mom when mom refused to have anything to do with her, then strung her up by a shower rod to make it look like she’d killed herself. 

Eventually there’s a typical Christine Conradt confrontation scene in which Miranda sneaks into Karen’s home (by this time Karen has thrown her out) and grabs a kitchen knife, intending to murder both Andrew and Karen with it — she gets as far as stabbing Andrew, though not fatally, and is about to kill Karen when the police arrive in the person of a very butch woman detective who shoots Miranda down before she can kill Karen. Christine Conradt’s usual trademark as a Lifetime writer is moral ambiguity — she likes to make her villains complex characters so we feel for them even as we root for the rather simple-minded heroines (or, more rarely, heroes) they’re attempting to entrap — but on this script she offered us way too little on What Made Miranda Run and mostly ran the Lifetime cliché machine on autopilot. Either that or she was rewritten: this was actually filmed under the title The Guest She Met Online and changed to the more florid and obvious title The Psycho She Met Online, and while no other writer is credited it’s possible someone rewrote Conradt’s script, not enough to qualify for credit but enough to make the film itself, as well as its title, more blatantly black-and-white in its morality. The acting is O.K. — no one really stands out, and Chelsea Hobbs is such a blah screen presence it’s hard to root for her (especially since Conradt makes her a whiz at her job — though one would think that in the final scene, once her own life was no longer in danger she’d make a bee-line to her wounded husband and treat him, and she doesn’t — but a dolt in virtually everything else), while Charity Shea delivers a good but by-the-numbers performance as the titular psycho: she’s engagingly evil but we’ve seen this sort of acting in a million other Lifetime movies. And the men are simply along for the ride, though Yani Gellman has some nice moments when he realizes the woman he’s just taken home and screwed is his sister-in-law and he’s revolted because it feels incestuous even though they’re not biological kin.