once in a Lifetime

[thecatamites]

lifetime movie and dtv thriller thread because i feel sorta bad whenever i post one of these in the movie thread in between people trying to have a conversation about the apu trilogy or something. feel free to post whatever thing you saw on tv made you feel like you were watching someone’s private paranoid break in the form of a 90min movie starring eric roberts with a title like The Deadliest Sperm Donor (there is a real movie on this theme with the infinitely better name “Seeds Of Deception”)

Open Marriage (2017) - find out all the secrets of an open marriage: learn what all the op ed guys are talking about. what works, what doesn’t? the main thing that works is that your most eyes wide shut coded friends will invite you on an app i could have sworn was called Polygula to start heading down to one of those industrial basement sex caverns from the films of the late nineties and meet some sexy vampire-coded people. a funny thing is that i guess the sex cave is run by a leather clad bald lady meant to represent the outre perils of having Too Much Sex who makes a big thing of slowly inviting people in and swaying around as she leads them downstairs. but all her lines are stuff like “rule number three… have fun” and “we have sex on the beach… or maybe you’d prefer a cocktail ;)”. even youth pastors have a second job nowadays. i did like that at one point she also gestures down a corridor and goes “and down here is Pandora’s Labyrinth… but i don’t think you’re ready for that.” not yet advanced enough to have sex with the floating crystals of the labyrinth

(also, each time she gives them this whole run through all the leads just hang out at the bar at the end and ogle people and go ahh uhh just water please. it really made me get why places have a drinks minimum)

anyway this is an aside bc most of the movie is about more standard lifetime movie people, the way you can tell it’s an Erotic Thriller this time is bc the guy wears a shirt in like two scenes and they don’t have (but are trying for!) a baby. some plot is driven by the guy having only a 1% chance of successfully being able to conceive… i say some bc it kind of gets lost in the shuffle of all the other kinds of plot complication going on (he goes back to the sex cave by himself, but it turns out SHE is also going there with his best friend, who she is both officially open marriage fucking and non-officially seeing, and he has a back injury and is relying on a big job from the sex-negative mayor). it definitely feels like an erotic thriller made by people who have no idea what either of those words mean and are just kind of winging it. the big climax is the evil lesbian wife of the best friend forces the female lead to dress up like her so they can have oddly chaste sex with each others husbands while side by side on the same bed. just sort of, doing their best.

there is some good anti-drug-psa-but-about-polyamory energy as you’d expect, they start out trying to win you over with talk of “trust” and “rules” and next thing you know you’re being surreptitiously photographed by an owl woman in the club who keeps delivering ominous dolls to your house etc, but the main appeal is that the cast sort of all give the vibe that they don’t know where the script is going and are just trying to wing each line as it comes to them. dialogue includes

• you enjoyed YOURSELF last night
• wasnt that the point?
• i guess… i mean yeah, it was

and my personal favourite at the end: “this does remind me of all those times we spent together… the hot times”.

finally please enjoy this screencap of the extremely distracting gym mural in the background whenever the two guys are working out. this isnt hallmark anymore!! this is lifetime!! the world is hell!!

Paranoid Chant

[hellojed]

[villain]

A podcast I listen to has an entire Patron-only subseries about Lifetime movies. It’s insane how many Stalked by My Doctor movies there are.

[Father.Torque]

Lifetime Containment Zone

[eska]

when daphny’s house watched them all it was all i could see on letterboxd for like a week

[Iammadmak]

I am going to use this thread as a way to post lifetime adjacent thriller movies i have worked on.

Deadly Estate | Official Trailer | A Tubi Original

This plot doesn’t make any sense.

One Deadly Decision (TV Movie 2023) ⭐ 4.8 | Thriller

They didn’t even cut a trailer for this. Director was nice but they cut a day of filming and got mad when we didn’t shoot all the scripted scenes.

Killer Coworker | Official Trailer | A Tubi Original

Director didn’t want to be there. Due to poor scheduling we didn’t get to film a bunch of erotic stuff from the script. Lead actress was nice to work with.

Meet The Killer Parents | Official Trailer | A Tubi Original

Kate Vernon was really mean to hair and make up on day one because she thought they were making her look old.

Twisted Neighbor | Official Trailer | A Tubi Original

Director was nice, knew what kind of movie he was making and made it a fun set.

All of this slop is shot in three weeks with maximum two takes per set up. Capital C content.

[Rudie]

@thecatamites

they can have oddly chaste sex with each others husbands while side by side on the same bed. just sort of, doing their best.

This is like half of the Free Love movies from the 70s.

[thecatamites]

honestly i might have to watch killer coworker and twisted neighbour… i’m impressed that meet the killer parents seems like an attempt at a get out clone for suburban white women??

the stalked by my doctor movies are honestly a lot of fun, although my favourite of these has to be Dying For The Crown starring recurring spike lee collaborator and blair witch goth Kim Director. for a format that’s 90% made up of functionally interchangeable areas, people, plot devices etc i feel like what seperates a good one of these from the bad is like… a certain quality of gusto… when they approach the ridiculous these things either dial it back or gun it and you want something that will gun it all the way

[Iammadmak]

I jokingly referred to Meet The Killer Parents as “White Out” to myself when we were making it. We also were dealing with terrible weather in a movie where important stuff happens near an external plot device.

[daphaknee]

Christmas Cottage (2008)

Thomas kinkade universe

[thecatamites]

The Wrong Life Coach (2024) - FELLAS - did you ever find you’ve simply hired the wrong life coach? if you answered “no” then don’t worry because you are squarely in the demographic for this film. an interesting thing about the lifetime movies is that they take place in a somewhat harsher moral realm than hallmarkier dtv: in those anything newfangled - hashtags, relationship gurus, rock climbing activiites and so forth - is always portrayed as a little goofy but ultimately positive and a learning experience. in these anything new is simply another avenue for maniacs to crawl into your life, which at times gives things a daydrunk-adorno-watching-QVC kind of reflexive negative energy in the depiction of these random targets. as one character hisses to another, “did you know you don’t need any research or training to be a life coach? you just declare yourself one!!”

the important thing about this movie in particular is that it’s a david decoteau joint, stepping away from his longrunning 1313 series of dtv quasi-porno about hunky brief-clad boys hanging around in exactly one bizarrely decorated house every movie, taking very long showers and occasionally lying down on a bed while an evil milf scans them with a wand. i regret to say it does not take place in The House but he manages to put some juice on it - there are some good scenes that kind of break out of the usual dtv level of dramatic situation and into a strange, charged hyperreality feeling. for example one of the Wrong Life Coach’s first lessons is that the main girl should send back her salad bc she asked for no onions. i believe an ordinary director would not make the waiter act some kind of hostile videogame entity who immediately starts yelling at them, causing the manager to come over and fire him on the spot, and then the life coach follows him into the kitchen to mock him and he yells “who do you think you are!” and tries to fistfight her and gets tasered in the nuts as she says “i’m a powerful woman watching you shake at my feet.” later on it’s revealed the life coach hates the protagonist for highschool cheer squad drama reasons, so of course there’s a scene where she dresses in her old outfit and stands in the backyard doing vigorous cheer gestures with a hateful expression while chanting “intimidate and dominate!” to nobody in particular. apparently his new series is “the wrong X” and he has already made 24 other variations of the formula. as my partner said he is “entering his toxic yuri era”… although he does include a scene where the generic hunk boyfriend (“green power ranger”, power rangers samurai) gets knocked unconscious by an evil milf in a weirdly well equipped workout room, as an easter egg for fans of his earlier work.

i don’t want to gas it up as it’s mostly a standard lifetime movie but every little helps. the main lady starts as a kind of quivering blob who spends every scene making teeth-baring goblin grimaces as people talk to her and she falls into the life coach’s hands by being insufficiently decisive about her coffee order (when the barista dares to remark the LC’s recommendation sounds a little sugary, she makes sure to hang back and hiss “leave the advice to me.”) before you know it she is following around the lifecoach like a little dog, parroting everything she says, breaking up with her boyfriend and quitting her job, which makes it v funny when it turns out all this happens in a single week. incidentally the boss is played by “the wrong x” series producer vivica a fox in a variety of great shirts.

you can tell the marketing dept agrees with me about the shirts bc here is the poster for a movie she’s in for about ten minutes.

a funny thing about these kinds of films is that even when the premise is, basically homoerotic, it’s rare that it can ever be announced as such. something i didn’t mention about Open Marriage is that a few different supportive nothing side characters are gay, presumably in the hopes it’d feel less weird when the villain turns out to be a crazed secret lesbian who wants to become her friend by having sex with her husband (dialectic??). in this one, in addition to being the lifelong subject of hate-fixation the heroine is basically picked up by the villainess in a coffee shop and spends the next day posing for sexy lingerie photos (weirdly referred to only as “nudes”) that her new friend offers to take under pretext of impressing the bf (dialogue: “isn’t this a little exploitative?” “when it’s your decision, it’s called Power.”) after a while it feels reasonable that they don’t comment on it, basically the cinema equivalent of shrugging and going “c’mooonn.”

some other notes:

• longtime decoteau collaborator eric roberts (talking cat, “a talking cat?!”) has an alarming late cameo but doesn’t really get to do anything fun alas
• one of the ways the movie portrays the life coach as evil is by having her suck on a hardboiled sweet and then when no-one’s looking take it out of her mouth and drop it back in the bowl
• once she get lifecoached our heroine makes a confident tiktok in which she declares she is “pulling her legs out of the sludge that is life”
• the in-universe gmail equivalent is named “Gobble.laMail”

as always ms fox gets the last word

[thecatamites]

Deadly Illusion (2021) - crazed, cursed movie from the netflix mines. in general as far as i can see netflix’s basic thing nowadays is just to take meat n potatoes dtv genre filmmaking and throw enough money at it that they look sorta like real movies; in the case of the hallmark style romcom, a format which has attained the stylistic rigour and purity of greek orthodox icon painting, these efforts just feel slightly crass and baggy. but a sudden injection of cash into The Babysitter Next Door genre of domestic thriller turns out to cause it to hybridise… above the waist, something that looks vaguely like a 90s-style erotic thriller; below, the scuttling crab legs of a lifetime original. the agonized faces of brian de palma and stephen king mouth soundlessly from somewhere in the torso. extending an arm, which vaguely resembles academy award winning picture black swan, this new creature pulls the door off the hinges and lurches forth into the night… and into our hearts…??..

kristin davis aka the one i never remember from sex and the city STARS as a famous writer of dark thrillers, who lives inside an oddly blocky minecraftish house with 2 child moppets and husband dermot mulroney (remember when the ultimate sign of spiritual despair in burn after reading was two of the characters heading on a date to “the new dermot mulroney movie”?). she is under pressure to start the new novel… would it help if she hired someone to mind the kids? what about if that someone spoke two languages and attended an ivy league college? well, it turns out that an entire agency for provisioning such people exists around the block, and soon the interviews are all lined up. each of the interviewees has some little tic presented to indicate their obvious unsuitability to i guess the middle aged viewer (“millenials” be “using hand desanitiser” in the interview!!)… but who is this cycling up the lane? it is greer grammer, daughter of tvs frasier, who through a variety of mom-friendly qualities (dresses like a tradwife influencer, reads REAL books, is effortlessly polite and servile) soon lands the position. i sure hope she doesn’t have a hidden dark side, right?

the thing is - she doesn’t! not immediately at least, coming across for most of the movie like such a hapless pushover that my partner kept describing her as “yassified Dobby”. and the movie intead becomes about a leering, cigar-puffing kristin davis getting horny for a babysitter she creepily describes as “childlike”. taking her to a bra store to feel her up (on her first day of employment??), nude swimming, foot massage, da woiks. did i mention that davis is also a troubled author in the most garth marenghi way: in addition to the cigar, which it’s always fun to see her with, she has an omnipresent whiskey tumbler, conspiracy board full of novel notes, is given to ominously warning that whenever she writes a new novel she “becomes a different person” and starts losing track of time, what’s real, etc. here are her books btw.

admittedly the dark author framing never feels that convincing, in part bc she keeps going “yaayyy :)” and “yippeee” like a little german boy and also because her character is otherwise basically the same as the heroine from The Wrong Life Coach, or any other lifetime movie mom. it’s hard to articulate but somehow everything about the movie’s sense of character, aesthetic, moral etiquette etc very decisively mark it as a lifetime movie - and within that framework there is absolutely no chance that the chirpy, too-good-to-be-true babysitter with a slightly shadowy past who infiltrates the family unit will NOT be an evil master manipulator. but while we’re waiting for that shoe to drop we also occasionally get davis vamping it up, or enthusing to her friend how exciting she finds it to have a live-in servant she can command to have sex with her (the friend, who is black, does not directly reply). so there’s a fun kind of Raising Cain quality in that, like… there is absolutely none of the “psychology” that these kinds of twisty, what-is-real thrillers usually invoke, there’s just such a crazed mash of abstract genre signifiers that it’s genuinely hard to determine what’s being conveyed or why. what if the protagonist of a lifetime movie was also a genderswapped version of the chopped footage from homer badman?? the question remains undecided until the final 20 minutes, when the babysitter starts saying things like “one thing you should know about me is, i’m COMPLETELY insane” and screaming “ME, you CUNT” in an exorcist voice to the presumably rhetorical question of who stabbed dermot mulroney.

throughout there is some back and forth on what is real, some metatextual foreshadowing in the notes she gets from her publisher (“you know NOTHING about me, you don’t know what you’re talking about and you should be fired” is her neil breenish response to a flunky given to tonelessly saying things like “the numbers… they make sense”), some evil/horny dreams, all building to a suggestion that the hacky genre elements are a reflection of the character’s psyche as a bad writer etc. i have considered these readings as part of my due diligence and decided i don’t really care about them since the movie is in fact dumb and unreal no matter which angle you try to look at it from. but i still had fun with it, in a pained, how-is-this-two-hours kind of way. the abrupt surfacing of lesbian content that was already sort of implicit in the lifetime model but remained buried, the way that content is nevertheless filtered through a movie made by people who i’m pretty sure don’t know what sex is and who have to wing their representation of it from memory of 90s thriller conventions (it involves feeding people honey and pouring milk on them and stuff, right? cerealsexual). the extreme sense of webdrama pacing. approaching the issue of whats real and whats not with a level of crazy melodrama and abstraction that for a second made me wonder in excitement if i was watching the asylum pictures version of inland empire. and a movie that kept me on edge with at least one question: i don’t care who really did what. but i gotta know: what’s with all the pillows? you wouldn’t need to get pulled back into writing one more thriller if you just cut back on pillows!!

however. if you do, i hope all your future contracts are written with this sense of drama

[Iammadmak]

Deadbolt | Official Trailer | A Tubi Original

I worked on this one in Hamilton back in November and December 2023. It was originally called Too Close for Comfort. As per usual, shot in three weeks with long days with one camera. Director was nice and competent and communicated well. Lead actress was good at her job and was very professional. Lead love interest was an arrogant dick, didn’t like that guy. The production company wants better movies with more effects and stunts for the same or less money and that’s not really possible. These movies are capital C content for the streaming troughs to sell advertisements. I do think it is funny that they used a take in the trailer where the mirror breakage fucked up instead of the actual good take.

[thecatamites]

Sleepwalking In Suburbia (2017) - moving awareness film about the dangers of sexsomnia, the severe if fictitious sounding medical ailment where you have sex with people while you sleep (which makes it sound more like an amway scam). i am assured that it is real but hopefully leads to less of a bodycount irl than it did in this movie, taking place as it does in a suburb of “seattle” where nobody locks any of the doors to their houses. “what’s the worst that could happen - a beautiful woman walks in and starts having sex with me, causing an unlikely train of events that leads to my death? cmon.”

it starts out with the main lady bolting upright in the middle of the night, sleepwalking downstairs, sleep-heating up some milk on the electric oven and then sleepwalking straight over to the neighbours house to have sex with him. he does not seem confused or perturbed that she says nothing and is constantly staring ahead like an old timey zombie, i guess due to media effects from too many david decoteau movies. anyway after that things go on as usual except the NEXT night she goes into a female friends house, climbs into bed with her and her husband and starts sleep-making out with the wife. everyone is pretty understanding about it all things considered.

there is some standard lifetime movie stuff with the neighbour who we KNOW is sleazy bc he has stubble, a greasy little forelock, wanders around with a tumbler full of whiskey and has a construction job as opposed to the husband’s architectural practice. the main lady has been trying for a kid, she is suddenly pregnant, she fears it’s his, etc. but things take a sudden step up when she is sleepwalking along a road at night and suddenly has to dodge roll out of the way of a gigantic pickup truck, whose hooded driver then gets out and starts firing at her with a handgun! could it be male neighbour… male neighbour’s girlfriend, prone to mixing alcohol with medication and then yelling at people and also grabbing people’s dicks while making a snake hand… her husband who seems to suddenly be wearing ominous giallo killer gloves in the last few scenes… some combination of the above… there is also some fun stealth business where she wakes up in the neighbour’s house without his knowing and has to sneak out while he waves a gun around.

in the meantime there is some fun business with the medical mystery angle. it’s worth noting that she is never actually diagnosed with sexsomnia - the doctor just keeps awkwardly bringing it up at a point in the movie where she doesn’t know she’s actually had sex with anyone while asleep, and never gets around to testing it because all the hospital beds are taken. instead he prescribes hypnosis tapes, seemingly recorded by whoever voiced The Nozzle in the venture bros (“you are the most relaxed you have ever been”) and also suggests regression therapy. she never gets around to the latter so unfortunately never finds out whether or not her dad was the black dahlia killer.

eventually she gets around to having her husband handcuff her to the bed, werewolf style, then immediately wakes up in a pool of neighbour’s blood, also werewolf style. released on bail the next day she then breaks back into the house where it happened to clear her name, only to get chased around by the neighbour’s girlfriend holding a knife (she doesn’t seem to know what’s been going on and keeps irritably asking why there’s police tape all over the house). but this turns out to be a false trail / she was just enacting the castle doctrine and the true villain is the husband, still in the giallo gloves, who has devised a complicated plan to kill multiple people around his wife’s sleepwalking based on basically annoyance about sleepwalking. once again sexsomnia-related ignorance claims lives… i can only salute the filmmakers for being so dedicated to raising awareness on this topic, which i guess is why this movie has a sequel where she fights Stalked By My Doctor. the aliens vs predator of lifetime originals. i can’t wait, but my attention was also caught by a movie that was being pushed pretty hard in the ad spots of the movie rip i was watching:

EARLY RELEASE aka MOMMY'S PRISON SECRET - Movie Trailer (starring Kelli Williams)

so we shall see… anyway two last things about the movie i liked: before turning out to be a maniac killer i liked that the hubby got some of the most enjoyably dopey dialogue of anyone in these movies. when asked if his wife has any enemies, after she gets shot at, he replies “of course she doesn’t! everybody loves my wife!!” and after hearing a cautionary tale about a sleepwalker who stepped off a bridge his response is to ask “so what happened?”. another beautiful mind perverted by evil. finally, i enjoyed this shot representing the miscarriage of justice in becoming the most normcore person in the goth holding cell.

[thecatamites]

Stalked By My Doctor - A Sleepwalker’s Nightmare (2019) - very excited to watch this, to my knowledge the first official crossover of the lifetime channel intrusive thought extended universe. it’s a sequel not only to “sleepwalking in suburbia”, discussed above, but also to the “stalked by my doctor” series starring eric roberts. the first one of those was a comparatively staid thriller about the danger of a handsome doctor played by eric roberts saving your daughter’s life, fixating on her, and using various evil medical abilities to carry her away like baby mario. by the time it gets to stalked by my doctor 3 it’s basically turned into lifetime de palma - unannounced dream sequences, elaborate reversal schemes, faked deaths, sudden dance numbers, eric roberts talking to his subconscious as represented by another eric roberts in a hawaiian shirt, and his evil schemes have evolved to things like kidnapping two girls to transplant their hearts into one another so that both of them can love him. by the time this one begins he’s basically like a batman villain i guess, everyone seems to know his name if not recognize his face and he’s prone to dramatically whispering it into people’s ears whenever he stabs them. first victim is a passing therapist who he pours coffee on while having an erotic dream sequence in the middle of his busboy job. i really love the therapist’s needlessly long and involved harangue (“you incompetent fool!! you loser!! youre not even fit to wipe my table!! you must really be a failure to be a busboy at your age!!”) which is our first clue to the heightened emotional universe this movie operates in.

MEANWHILE - returning sleepwalking in suburbia heroine michelle gets up in the middle of the night and sleepwalks over to a nearby wedding, where she casts a pall on events by making out with the groom (bride response - “everything is RUINED!!”). but the groom is dressed like he’s in a 2010s indie folk band complete with dark dress shirt and suspenders so i think it’s probably for the best. anyway for this and other reasons she decides to check herself into the sleep clinic, where her new therapist turns out to be, well.

the plot for this one actually gets quite involved - in addition to the two leads there’s the heroine’s young niece who suffers from a different, even more exploitation-cinema-ready sleep disorder which is basically cartoon hypnosis where she has to do whatever anyone tells her while asleep…the suspicious medical coworkers… the niece’s boyfriend… a mysterious guy called Nicky Bismar who follows the doctor around while he’s committing crimes and is constantly holding an unlit cigar (are they allowed to smoke in these movies?)… it feels a bit sleazier than the usual antiseptic lifetime thing, like there’s a part where the heroine is framed for sleep murder and instantly tied to a bed at Greasy Dutch-Angle Mental Asylum where everything is covered in slime and the doctor comes in to taunt her about lobotomy via electroshock, and all i could think was “this was a bit more tasteful in that Stuart Gordon movie”. the orderlies are all giggling sex offenders who failed the ethics test to work at the place from Terminator 2. she escapes by bonking them with a nightstick while pretending to be sexomnia-ing out.

the good news is that some of the sleep therapy parts are pretty fun. there’s one where she explains her condition to the doctor while he tries to hide that he’s just reading the symptoms list from wikipedia. there’s another one where while asleep she gets up and faces the one way mirror in the sleep therapy room and starts doing the come-hither gesture and wiggling against the glass, but when he has to talk to a coworker and doesn’t make it in in time(?) she just shrugs and climbs back into bed. in general i liked the parts which seemed to suggest the sleepwalking side of her personality had a xenomoph-esque level of dangerous cunning and attack ability, including what seemed like a mysterious power to tell when her niece was being inappropriately taken out to dinner by an older man. my big complaint about the movie is that she was awake for the finale like a regular person - i hoped she really would be asleep when busting out and end up fighting him the same way. the climax is actually kind of muted and the most exciting thing that happens in it is that eric roberts does a word scramble and finds that the mysterious “Nicky Bismar” who haunts and follows him around is actually “My Sick Brain”, a different and more evil non-eric roberts persona who gives him the speech about how inside us there are two dogs.

in the end he gets hit in the head with a shovel as is franchise tradition, and the heroine and niece state “no more therapy” as he’s carted away to be electrocuted in dubious videogamey medical institution. but i think the final word on the movie should go to the minor-character murder detective who asks “so, uh… sexomnia. is that for real?”

[daphaknee]

THE WAY HIS FACE LIGHTS UP THE SECOND HE HEARS THE WORD SEXSOMNIAC. this one is so much more comical than the others but then fucking eric roberts has gotta creep you out and always be reminding you hes the FUCKING WORST. hes too good at being sleezy, im always yelling at the screen PUT HIM AWAY!! KEEP HIM AWAY FROM EVERYONE whenever hes playing dr beck

i didnt like this the first time i watched it becuase i was so sick of eric roberts alters but the more i think about it afterwards the more i like it, might have to give it a rewatch

[daphaknee]

one of my favorite things about stalked by my doctor is his signature open palm violence slam on the plunger of a needle into someone

[thecatamites]

he does such good piling-it-on-too-thick, the most unbelievable parts of the films are the ones where the other characters are meant to find it charming at first but i like when their faces suggest they’re just thinking of it as like humouring a hammy old guy on the bus or something. the only character who really falls for it being the dad from the first one is perfect. also i havent seen stalked 5 yet but hoping he goes back to more elaborate medical crimes instead of just stabbing people with a big knife!!

[daphaknee]

yeah when the mom yells at the idiot dad WHAT ARE WE JUST GONNA SIT AROUND UNTIL SHE GETS RAPED (paraphrasing it’s been a minute) it made it feel like that character was written specifically to say the things out loud that a viewer usually shouts at the screen

I really like how competent the women are in stalked by my doctor like it’s kinda refreshing

[thecatamites]

Mommy’s Prison Secret (2017) - unfortunately less good than the title. this one’s about a surburban mom just finishing parole after spending a few years in jail when her ex cellmate arrives in town and insinuates into her life and etc. the main good thing about it is that the cellmate in question looks like someone made cynthia rothrock in the fallout character creator and turned certain sliders up all the way. like anytime she shares a scene with the protagonist it has that unmistakable player talking to a mob NPC energy. i kept expecting the heroine to ask her to go kill 17 rats.

the other thing i liked is that after the cellmate ends up staying with them indefinitely she confines herself for most of the movie to, like, mild mischief, like leaving a mess in the air fryer as she tries to make fried chicken, playing music late at night, drinking juice right from the bottle or eating the last ice cream in the fridge etc. she does make passes at the husband every so often but he just looks expressionless and says things like “problem?” as she hands him her bra and walks away. there is a good scene where she engages in similar levels of flirtation with the teen daughter’s wrestler boyfriend while wearing a croptop saying AMERICA, which seemed for a moment like it was gonna launch off into a much better movie.

a funny thing abt this one is it’s sort of cops can’t help you / only trust your fists etc but exclusively from the bougie winemom direction. every time she interacts with an authority they either try to arrest her for nothing or turn out to be in on the grift… the saddest moment of prejudice is when she forgets her wallet and the local chain supermarket wont extend her groceries on credit(?). i did enjoy that she never seems like repentent or humble and spends the whole first half of the movie complaining abt what a waste of time the probation system is, which makes it funny that the thing that got her sent to jail is a DUI! still, it turns out that all she needs to do is talk to the RIGHT authority, the prison warden, and from there everything gets straightened out. everyone learns an important lesson about redirecting the dread might of the criminal justice system towards suspiciously undercut butch women instead of beige-presenting lifetime movie moms who might simply enjoy finishing off a few bottles and driving around now and then. she’s once again instated in the good graces of her teen daughter and more importantly the chain supermarket, who offer her free groceries (which she righteously declines).

there is a funny moment when she finally gets off probation and says “now to do something i havent been able to do in years” and it cuts to her firing a gun at some cans in a field. unfortunately it’s kind of a misdirect as despite waving it around a lot she never gets to more than third-act-lifetime-movie levels of action heroism. i did like that the most heartfelt and grounded moment in the film is when she and her husband light up and talk about how good cigarettes are.

at the very end it soooorta seems like it might finally be broaching the subject of what got her into all this - that she shopped her prison lover (well, as close as you can get to making that kind of thing explicit in a lifetime movie, which is with the cobwebby evasiveness of a henry james) to the warden for early leave after first getting her protection. but any bad feelings she may have are handily resolved by a last minute daughter kidnapping and the reaffirmation that it’s ok to do whatever you want to other people as long as they’re not family. phew!! conflict resolved and she can go back to menacing local school boards regionwide. but all is not lost as at least the cellmate gets away at the end. hopefully she teams up with the lady from Dying For The Crown as they form a kind of Injustice League for elaborately inconveniencing suburban moms everywhere.