by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was a 2016 Lifetime movie called Stranger
in the House (not to be confused with a
theatrical film of that same title made a year earlier), a quirky thriller
written by Roslyn Muir and directed by Allan Harmon that essentially took a
bundle of old Lifetime clichés and jumbled them up at least a bit. Stranger
in the House opens with a series of montage
sequences explaining how financier Wayne Griegson (John Novak) was involved in
a car accident — he survived but his wife was killed — and shortly after that
he and his business partner Finch (Michael Kopsa) were indicted for running a
Ponzi scheme. They were acquitted, but the blowback from the charge led to
demonstrations in the street against them and also to Griegson being barred
from the securities business for life. Then the scene cuts to the palatial
mansion Griegson retired to, where his daughter Jade (Emmanuelle Vaughn,
top-billed) and son-in-law Marco (Matthew McCaull) live with him and have been
taking care of him since his accident. Wayne not only needs a wheelchair, he
also has an oxygen tank and mask mounted to it — he doesn’t need to breathe
oxygen continually but he gets short of breath at times and he needs a quick
hit of pure O2 to get over the crisis and stay alive.
Jade and Marco
(whose last name we never learn for sure — during the movie we see someone
doing a Web search on him and typing in “Esp-” but getting no farther than that
before director Harmon cuts away) have been married less than a year — he’s a
construction worker and wanna-be contractor Jade met and had a whirlwind
courtship with and they haven’t had time for a honeymoon since they’ve been too
busy taking care of Wayne. So they go online to look for a live-in caregiver,
and the woman who answers their ad is Samantha (Jordana Largy). She looks O.K.
(indeed, she looks so much like Emmanuelle Vaughn that her shorter, slightly
curlier hair is really the only way we can tell them apart) but she’s so
twitchy that for the first third of the movie it begins to seem like something
Christine Conradt would have written and called, natch, The Perfect
Caregiver. Jade and Marco go off on their
honeymoon just as we get a shot of Wayne and Samantha looking at each other and
looking like they’re about to “get close” — and when Jade and Marco return a
month later Wayne and Samantha are married. Later Wayne is found dead under
mysterious circumstances, and after that it turns out Samantha got Wayne to
alter his will so Samantha gets the house and Wayne’s entire fortune except for
one insurance policy she lets Jade keep, along with Jade’s mother’s jewelry.
“It’s not worth much — she really had bad taste,” Samantha perkily comments,
adding insult to injury. Samantha and Jade get into a number of arguments,
after one of which Samantha presents Jade with an eviction notice and Jade
responds by throwing a book at her — which Samantha uses as an excuse to file
charges against her. This involves the local cop, Detective Luke Harper (Dan
Payne, not quite as hot as Matthew McCaull but still quite easy on the eyes),
who persuades Jade to go to Samantha’s home and apologize to her. Jade does,
and the two have wine together, but Samantha gives a very Donald Trumpian
response — “I’ll think about it” — to Jade’s request that she drop the charges
against her.
Jade is especially concerned about being criminally charged
because she works as an attorney in partnership with a Black woman named
Chantal (Karen Holness), whom we realize if we’ve seen more than about four
Lifetime movies will ultimately be murdered because she gets too close to the
villain’s secrets — though writer Muir at least varies the formula enough that
… Anyway, even before the final confrontation between Samantha and Jade, Muir
and Harmon have dropped us a big hint that Marco and Samantha are having an
affair — we see them nuzzling in the wine cellar and, after Samantha’s final
confrontation with Jade, Marco returns to the house and he and Samantha get it
on in one of the quirky soft-core porn scenes that give a lot of otherwise lame
Lifetime movies a lot of their appeal. We’re obviously supposed to think that
Marco and Samantha are involved in some plot to get hold of the Griegson
millions — though if that was their aim why didn’t Marco just knock off Wayne
and then Jade and get the fortune for himself? Why did he need Samantha’s involvement? Things get even quirkier
when Samantha herself is found stabbed to death in her bathtub — a scene so
badly cut in that at first we think it’s just a dream of Jade’s that her
husband is killing her stepmom, only we soon learn it’s supposed to be a real
story event — and they get crazier when Jade is arrested for Samantha’s murder.
Fortunately Detective Harper has such a bad case of the hots for Jade that he
decides to keep investigating even though the rest of the town’s police force
is convinced that Jade did it, and he and Samantha go out together to the home
of the woman with whom Samantha used to live. (A police detective going out on
an investigatory call with the prime suspect? C’mon, Ms. Muir!) They find a
scrapbook containing newspaper stories on the Ponzi scheme allegedly run by
Wayne Griegson (ya remember the Ponzi scheme?) and eventually we get the Big Reveal: Marco and
Samantha were both adult children of investors who lost their life savings in
the scheme, and they met at a creditors’ meeting and hatched this elaborate
revenge plan to kill Wayne and get hold of the fortune that had been ripped off
from them and all the other investors.
There’s a big climax in which Marco
decides to kill Jade by feeding her wine spiked with an overdose of sleeping
pills, only she manages to keep consciousness long enough to sneak a sniff of
Wayne’s old oxygen supply (it’s still there?), which revives her enough that
after Marco knocks off Jade’s friend and work partner Chantal — she managed to
last longer than most of the African-American Best Friends in Lifetime movies
who stumble on the Big Secret;
most of them get offed about two-thirds of the way through but she survives
until the last reel — and eventually Detective Harper comes, rescues Jade and
calls in the coroner to take custody of the bodies. Jade decides to sell the
big house Wayne Griegson left her and use that and the rest of his fortune to
pay off as much as possible to the investors he defrauded, and she leaves town
— though there’s a bittersweet leave-taking between her and Detective Harper,
who’s clearly hoping for his own reasons that she’ll come back. Roslyn Muir
really does deploy some of the
Lifetime clichés in some relatively unexpected way, and director Harmon brings
an appealing sense of the Gothic to some of the scenes — even though he and
cinematograher Neil Cervin are way
too enamored of the past-is-brown look: every interior in the movie, no matter how much (or how
little) money the characters living there are supposed to have, is bathed in a
warm, autumnal glow. It should also be pointed out that Matthew McCaull and
Jordana Largy both pronounce the “t” in the word “often,” though Charles would
probably say, “The director told
them to say it that way so we’d know they were the villains by the bad English
they speak!” Actually we know Matthew McCaull is the villain — or we should —
right away by how good-looking he is; it’s one of Lifetime’s more monotonous
affectations that really hot-looking guys in Lifetime movies are always up to no good (though the almost-as-handsome Dan
Payne as the cop does get to be
on the side of good). Stranger in the House isn’t as dementedly silly as some Lifetime movies
have been, but it’s not exactly a great thriller either; it’s got too many plot
holes and bits of bizarre unbelievability, though in some ways the sheer
preposterousness of much of it is rather entertaining in and of itself!
