For the past three weeks, Lisa Marie has been in the process of reviewing 56 back to school films!  She’s promised the rest of the TSL staff that this project will finally wrap up by the end of today, so that she can devote her time to helping to prepare the site for its annual October horrorthon!  Will she make it or will she fail, lose her administrator privileges, and end up writing listicles for Buzzfeed?  Keep reading the site to find out!)

Oh Hell yeah!

Eric Roberts is back as Dr. Beck and, once again, he’s obsessed with a teenage girl!  Believe it or not, this is a good thing because this obsession leads to Dr. Beck spending a lot of time sitting in a car that’s parked in front of Amy’s (Claire Backwelder) high school.  By doing so, Dr. Beck justifies my decision to include the 2016 Lifetime film Stalked By My Doctor: The Return in my series of Back to School reviews.

Thank you, Dr. Beck!

As you may remember from last year’s Stalked By My Doctor, Dr. Beck is a neurotic doctor who has an unfortunate tendency to get obsessed with his patients.  At the end of the first movie, the good doctor narrowly escaped the police and was last seen flashing a somewhat nervous smile.

At the start of The Return, we find Dr. Beck now living in Mexico.  He’s done a pretty good job of avoiding arrest and has a successful career going as a beach bum but he has yet to find true love.  However, it seems like that might change when, one day, he spots a teenage girl drowning in the ocean.  Dr. Beck not only saves Amy from drowning but he also literally brings her back to life.  Seriously, my wonderful readers, be sure to learn CPR.

(Then again, I’m not sure that I’ve ever learned CPR.  I guess I should.  We can’t always depend on a crazy fugitive doctor to be around.)

Both Amy and her overprotective mom, Linda (Hilary Greer), are thankful and now, Dr. Beck is now obsessed all over again.  In fact, he’s so obsessed that he even risks capture by returning to the United States.  Under the pretense of merely wanting to check up on his patient, Beck starts to stalk Amy.  Taking a lesson from Nabokov’s Lolita, Beck starts to go out with the neurotic Linda.  By marrying Linda, Dr. Beck hopes that he can get to Amy.

All together now: Ewwwwwww!  Bad doctor!

Amy and her boyfriend (Mark Grossman) eventually grow suspicious of Dr. Beck.  They even recruit Amy’s Uncle Roger (Christopher Crabb) to investigate the good doctor.  However, Linda refuses to hear a word against him.  That’s not surprising, considering that she’s just agreed to marry him…

Stalked By My Doctor: The Return is a deliberately over-the-top melodrama, one that has more in common with the snarky satire of A Deadly Adoption than the previous Stalked By My Doctor.  Sprinkled throughout the film are several scenes in which Dr. Beck has conversations with the voices in his head and, as you can probably guess, Eric Roberts plays the Hell out of these scenes.  In fact, Roberts is a force of nature in this film, keeping a straight face while ripping through his overwrought dialogue and only stopping occasionally to wink at the camera, almost as if Dr. Beck realizes that he’s just a character in a Lifetime movie.  Roberts is obviously having a blast in the role and his demented joy is somewhat infectious.  After imagining that he’s killed a dining companion, a blood-covered Roberts says, “Check please,” and his delivery of that one-liner is absolutely brilliant.

Stalked By My Doctor: The Return is a blast of over the top, Eric Roberts-inspired lunacy.