AWOOOOOO… 
well, it’s been a while since i wrote up any of these. but for halloween this year i thought it’d be interesting to try checking out some Lifetime original movies, on the basis that while they’re not romcoms per se they’re sort of like the Treehouse Of Horror version of the same format - the same setting and texture but infused with a new creepiness. suddenly all those chance encounters the format had relied upon take on a paranoid and baleful aspect. is the handsome stranger sitting next to me on the flight a secret member of ms-13? are the other moms in my daughter’s dance class conspiring against me? haven’t i seen that face before?
with that in mind here are some thoughts on the Stalked By My Doctor series starring eric roberts as the doctor.
Stalked By My Doctor (2015) - this sets up the basic structure for the first two movies: a teenage girl has her life saved by a handsome and much older doctor, who as it happens we’ve just seen striking out with a woman his own age / who was conscious and coping poorly afterwards (driving at 115mph down the road screaming “I AM A DOCTOR!!! I AM A DOCTOR!!!”, punching some boxes around, in one memorable sequence jumping up and down on a child’s doll like a 1930s cartoon character). as the girl regains consciousness, he starts to stare soulfully into her eyes…
imo this is quite a weird premise in that it’s less drawing upon conventional medical phobias than on old medical-flavour romances like Magnificent Obsession or something (ladies, is it a red flag when someone blinds you in a car accident?). i think a big part of how eg hallmark movies avoid being TOO creepy is by always assuring us that the heroine has an out, never making the stakes too high that she seems railroaded into something. so you can kind of see how the old medical romance motifs could be used to undermine that, but it’s still kind of funny to me that part of the anxiety these movies play upon is “what if a total stranger saved my life??”
however if you are interested in weird paranoid facebook chain letter critiques of the institution of medicine the movie has you covered as well. not only can an evil yet award-winning cardiologist amend coroner’s reports and secretly poison people through their prescriptions with impunity, he can also just walk into the room when someone’s in the hospital for a totally non-heart-related ailment to eg steal their phone and secretly send rude texts with it (the lifetime channel blurs out the word “tits” but only after the first two letters have been typed). there are also multiple shots of him just roaming the hospital while the kind of grimy guitar music they used to put on the credits of silent hill games plays. perhaps the grossest part is when he demands to change her bandages again, and there’s a closeup of him putting lube on his fingers and then he starts to sensually massage her car accident wound. the lifetime channel presents “crash”.
in general the more conventional stalker movie stuff would be depressing if not for the chaotic ineptitude and exuberance with which it is performed - jumping bugeyed into a closet because the family came back while he was rolling around fully clothed and alone in the daughter’s duvet. the question of whether or not the guy might be a weirdo is pretty much wrapped up for everyone in the narrative by the 60 minute mark. he kidnaps the girl, fakes her death, her mom and boyfriend make a desultory attempt to solve the mystery and then - - they give up!! (should have checked the big human-sized crate at the foot of the bed! rookie mistake!). at this point there’s kind of a fun swerve into more of an action movie thing. relations will not help you, only trust your fists. until now a nonentity the girl suddenly starts screaming wonderfully movie-climax lines back and forth with the doctor (“YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT LOVE IS!!” “I REACHED RIGHT IN AND STARTED YOUR HEART AND I CAN END IT THE SAME WAY!!”), he starts getting ready to cut her limbs off, she wiggles free and gets to whack him in the head with a golf club three or four times before stealing his car and heading back home to gatecrash her own funeral. a last funny touch is that during the “return from the dead” scene all the background extras are smiling and clapping like they just witnessed a successful romcom proposal.
meanwhile police break into the house but no-one’s there. cut to the shadowy land of, “mexico”… we see a familiar figure lounging in a restaurant… he is waiting for a girl he met… online!!! watch your ass!
finally, no discussion of this movie would be complete without mentioning surprise MVP “the boyfriend”. not only does his gf need heart surgery after he gets into a car accident by slowly texting while driving (“Hi Sam Yes I Would Love To–”), there’s also a delightful scene afterwards where he complains to her that “i’ll never run at full speed again” and then angrily throws a soccer ball, knocking over all his soccer trophies. despite this he is played as mostly sympathetic, although his gf’s dad does throw his phone in a basket of medical waste. but his most important function in the movie is to prompt one of the most compelling “fake offscreen videogame” sequences i’ve seen in a while - clutching a ps2 controller and grimacing while loud, wooden pinball table clonking sfx play, punctuated by random screaming sounds and bursts of machinegun fire. as drive-by media criticism goes i have to admit this is pretty much on point.
Stalked By My Doctor: The Return (2016) picks up where the last one left off - eric roberts is in mexico, hiding from the fbi and unsuccessfully trying to pick up women by showing them pictures of his boat. but then one day at a beach he saves the life of a teenage drowning victim by performing perhaps the world’s least convincing CPR (medical tip learned from this movie: pushing down on someone’s chest doesn’t work unless you also yell “HUH! HUH! HUH!” like a street fighter character every time you do it). their eyes meet… and before you know it he is re-entering the US with a fake passport in order to creepily watch her on her pre-med college campus.
at this point there’s a wonderful fake out: firstly a paranoid dream sequence about being intercepted at border security, which ends on a first person shot of the border agent screaming directly into the camera about what a boneheaded mistake that was, very failure-state-in-an-FMV-game aesthetic. and then of course in the real world he passes through without incident. next, we see him peering at the girl and her boyfriend from his car… suddenly the boyfriend starts giving him an intense look. the boyfriend runs over and pulls him out of the car - he starts yelling “i’ve seen you watching her! are you one of those perverts?!” and then immediately punches the doctor in the stomach. at this point we are expecting it to be another feverish paranoid fake out, but it turns out - it’s not! just a feverish paranoid movie. fortunately the girl recognizes him too, says what a crazy coincidence, this is the doctor who saved my life, and is weirdly unperturbed when he says he just wanted to pay her a visit and then pulls a customised lifejacket with her name on it out of the car. they all go for coffee together and she starts talking about her lonely, ill, neurotic single mom, and how much she could use a boyfriend who may also perhaps be a rich doctor why not.
anyway he hatches a scheme to date and kill the mom to get close to the daughter and in case you were wondering if this was just lifetime network version of “lolita” let me inform you there’s another part where he reads a big book that just has NABOKOV written on the cover while hornily reciting a quote from that novel. red flag right there. i’m not strictly sure if the plot makes sense given the daughter in this case is a legally autonomous college student but let’s not get too fussy. one advantage it does have over the source material: a wonderful subplot where he takes a blood sample from the daughter in order to fake results that she has genital herpes, in order to get her to split up with her boyfriend. he also posts this information online, resulting in the following exchange:
other activities include making some pancakes that spell out the word AMY and giving her inappropriate lectures about oxytocin (“we call it the ‘cuddle hormone’”). she is alarmed enough by this to try enlisting the help of her uncle, who has long hair and listens to rock music - unfortunately these are also pretty reliable tells that he’s about to be killed. that sequence is one of the more memorable in the movie as the uncle is watching, like, one of those old-timey movies on tv during a scene where it just happens to parallel what’s happening in the world outside. only in this case the back and forth is so weirdly drawn out and involved that it becomes more and more distracting and eventually kind of preempts the “real movie” that it parallels. anyway rip to the uncle: he looked like billy ray cyrus in that one photo and had an album of guitar rock called “roadtunes”. he will be missed.
anyway eventually the doctor gets married and heads off to ironically murder his acrophobic wife by pushing her off a building. there’s a good bit where the daughter is trying to get the police on his case by telling them about the incriminating stuff she found after breaking into his house. the operator says “you… do realise that breaking and entering is a felony” and the daughter screams “YOU PEOPLE ARE IMPOSSIBLE” and hangs up the phone. in the end mother and daughter band together to smash a bottle of champagne across the doctor’s head (how many head injuries does it take before someone is legally unable to practice medicine?) and hand him over to the police. case closed…or is it…?
Stalked By My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge (2017) - well, as it happens eric roberts has escaped justice by means of sexily winking at one of the jurors at his murder trial and is now set to move on to a new career which will hopefully give him less opportunity to predate upon young people, that of a college professor. meanwhile the returning victim from the first movie, who has since upskilled into dressing like lydia lunch, vows revenge. what happens next could be described as a meditation on “cancel culture” even more sweatily paranoid and unintelligible than most takes on the subject which is saying something.
for one thing dr beck has finally made the hannibal lector type leap into just being the protagonist now, complete with inner monologue represented by arguing with a version of himself who wears a hawaiian shirt. also from his pov is what seems like a marked increase in the amount of bizarre sexual fantasy sequences, where his college students abruptly pull open their tops while erotically chewing on pencils or the goth lady tearfully says that she was wrong and wants to have a threesome with him. the most elaborate of these was easily the full on old hollywood choreographed song and dance sequence that roberts and his love interest (more on which later) engage in on a hillside at night - my wife pointed out that this movie was the year after la la land.
meanwhile in the movie’s real world he is busy trying not to get cancelled from his university position by the mean goth lady who keeps pointing out that he tried to murder her. this part is pretty funny since we already know she’s right - it’s the same actress and everything - but it still kind of plays things as if she’s the badguy, as we see her skulking around at night to hide pornography inside the doctor’s lesson plans or paying guys with sleeveless denim jackets to give him a pretty desultory roughing up. eventually they hit an impasse - she successfully gets him fired by means of a petition (which the dean of the college mentions in hushed tones), while he gets her kicked out of the school by framing her for a fentanyl addiction. but the most delirious escalation comes when she ambushes him at home, ties him up outside, and starts trying to castrate him with a pair of scissors. so props to the filmmakers for both recognizing and following through on the extent to which the “university cancellation gone wild” discourse was an expression of weird sublimated sex fantasies.
anyway she doesn’t get to go through with it because a different college student chases her off, this one is the love interest, a medical student in the doctor’s class who tells him all the other guys in class are too immature for her (“you could say i’m allergic to guys” - his response: “i hope it’s not contagious”) and that she’s always had a thing for older man. so they get together, after aforementioned musical sequence, and in short order she’s telling him they have no choice but to track down and murder the goth girl together. buying a gun, they creep up on her car - the college girl fires through the window and then runs away to keep shooting at the car until it explodes in a ball of cgi flames. mission accomplished!! except when the cops come to talk to the doctor about all this, she ties herself to the bed and acts as though she’s been held captive the last few weeks. “if i didn’t obey him he was going to cut my boobs off or something”, she tearfully explains to the cops. meanwhile the doctor manages to escape.
in addition to being made after la la land, this movie was also made after gone girl. the doctor tails the college student to see what’s been going on, and finds she’s been in cahoots with the goth girl all along and is now giving her a makeover so that the latter can start a new life after having faked her death. the absolute most charitable reading i can give for the makeover look here is “stolen greek valour”.
also the car explosion was set up by means of, quote, “we researched the internet and learned how to make a bomb”. the doctor attacks them both with plans to exorcise their evil by performing a double heart transplant - putting the heart of each girl in the other’s body - not sure how this was to have worked exactly. they successfully fight him off by means of a tom & jerry esque frying pan to the head and then repeatedly bludgeoning him with an unloaded shotgun. head trauma count: unknowable by this point. as always however he escapes at the last minute and leaves both girls to the cold intentions of the law.
he will return in two more movies, one of which (Stalked By My Doctor: Sleepwalker’s Nightmare) is actually a crossover with a different lifetime movie about a lady who has sexsomnia (sleepwalking but for sex). however i will leave it off for now as this first trilogy culminates the vision of original auteur doug campbell, writer and director of all three movies. keep an eye out for “psycho swim instructor”, now filming somewhere.
