Lifetime Movie Review: The Wrong Life Coach (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2024’s The Wrong Life Coach, Morgan Bradley stars as Jordan Roberts, whose popularity as a high school cheerleader did little to prepare her for the pressures of adult life. Her career is going nowhere. Her boss (Vivica A. Fox) does not respect her. Her boyfriend (Hector David, Jr.) is bored with her and their vanilla sex life. Her mother (Tracy Nelson) is living with her and trying to control her life. Jordan needs someone to help her get her life together. She needs a life coach!

(Personally, I’ve never gotten the whole life coach thing but whatever. Apparently, it works for some people.)

A chance meeting with Liz Kimble (Allison McAtee) changes Jordan’s life. Though Jordan doesn’t really remember her, she and Liz went to high school together. And it turns out that Liz is now a life coach! Soon, Liz is encouraging Jordan to take sexy pictures, demand more from her career, and to stand up to her domineering mother!

At first, it all seems perfect. Except …. Liz is not a certified life coach! She’s just repeating a bunch of stuff that she heard from her own life coach, Rhonda (Meredith Thomas). It may sound like the start of a hilarious comedy but it turns out that Liz is a little bit crazy. Liz has never gotten over losing her spot on the cheerleading squad to Jordan and now, she’s determined to get revenge,

In quick order, Jordan loses her job, her relationship with her mother, and nearly her boyfriend as well! Plus, her best friend has gone missing! After Jordan tells Liz to get lost, Liz begins to obsessively stalk Jordan. What Jordan doesn’t know is that Liz has placed hidden cameras all over her house and she’s even hacked into Jordan’s email. Jordan thinks that she’s had a good job interview with Mr. Gordon. (Hey, it’s Eric Roberts!) But remember those lingerie-clad photos that Liz encouraged Jordan to send to her boyfriend? Well, those pictures end up getting sent to Mr. Gordon as well.

“I couldn’t hire you if I wanted to,” Mr. Gordon says. When even Eric Roberts refuses to work with you, you know you’ve asked the wrong person for advice!

“Girl, you listened the wrong life coach.”

She sure did!

I love the Lifetime “Wrong” films. The Wrong Life Coach is a tremendous amount of fun, from Allison McAtee’s over-the-top performance as Liz to the side-eye that Vivica A. Fox gives Jordan every time she makes a mistake. As always, with the “Wrong” films, director David DeCoteau fully embraces the melodrama and creates a film that’s so ludicrous that you can’t help but love it. Any director could make a film about a crazy life coach. But only David DeCoteau has the courage to have that life coach make her diabolical plans while wearing her old high school cheerleader uniform.

Watching this film reminded me of how much I love Lifetime and its demented films. I look forward to reviewing a lot more of them in 2025!

Hopefully, more than a few of them will feature Eric Roberts!

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Lifetime Film Review: Desperate Widows (dir by Lane Shefter Bishop)

Posted on May 20, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Some people are cult people and some people aren’t.

Me, I’ve never been a cult person. Some of that’s because, as a result of my ADD, I get bored way too easily to spend hours listening to some deranged cult leader give a speech. Some of that is because I’m naturally suspicious of people who try too hard to convince me that they’re always happy and excited and enthusiastic, which is something that I’ve noticed people in cults seem to do. I’m a big believer in doing what you want. I’m also a big believer in the idea that I already know all the answers to life’s big questions so I’m really not vulnerable to people who claim otherwise. That’s one of the many advantages of believing in yourself.

Another reason why I could never join a cult is because I hate the idea of living on a commune. The whole idea of being forced to create a community with a bunch of strangers just creeps me out. Add to that, I’m not a fan of living in impersonal dorms and I don’t really like doing farmwork and I’m not into sing-alongs around the campfire. I certainly don’t like camping and or living in buildings that don’t have any running water. Commune living is just not for me and fortunately, that will always make me immune to being brainwashed into joining a cult.

In the Lifetime film Desperate Widows, Dianne (Allison McAtee) insists that she doesn’t run a commune. Sure, it may look like a commune and it may have a lot of commune-style rules and everyone acts like they’re living on a commune but Dianne insists that she actually runs a …. wait for it …. a mommune! It’s a retreat for moms and their daughters, one that is especially popular with moms who have just lost a husband. It can do wonderful things for people, just as long as everyone’s willing to follow the rules. For one thing, the moms and daughters are separated and sent to live in separate dorms. For another thing, everyone has to do manual labor for most of the day and anyone who fails to take it seriously will run the risk of being put in isolation.

BUT IT’S TOTALLY NOT A COMMUNE!

As soon as recently widowed Paige (Justine Eyre) and her teenage daughter, Allie (Olivia Stuck) arrive at the comm …. sorry, excuse me …. mommune, they suspect that there’s something not quite right about the place. Allie figures it out pretty quickly. It takes Paige a day or two longer, despite the fact that Paige is a best-selling writer of thrillers and you would figure that she would know better than to trust a bunch of secretive people living out in the middle of nowhere. Soon, both Paige and Allie want to leave but it turns out that leaving is not going to be easy. This mommune is full of all sorts of sordid secrets that dangerous people do not want revealed to the rest of the world.

This Lifetime film required a healthy suspension of disbelief. The same can be said about most Lifetime films but this one required even more than usual. That said, if you can accept that Paige would ever have been stupid enough to go to the mommune in the first place, Desperate Widows is entertaining. I liked Allison McAtee’s performance as the sinister Dianne and Justine Eyre and Olivia Stuck were believable as mother and daughter. What I really appreciated is that it didn’t take long for Paige to be like, “This place is messed up,” and to realize that she needed to find her daughter and escape.

Most importantly, Desperate Widows served as a warning against commune living. That’s a message that everyone can get behind.

Lifetime Film Review: Deadly Mile High Club (dir by Doug Campbell)

Posted on May 3, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I watched the latest Lifetime premiere, Deadly Mile High Club!

Deadly Mile High Club tells the story of three people who end up flying the unfriendly skies together. Tanya (Allison McAtee) is a flight instructor who has been haunted ever since the tragic crash that took the life of her lover and co-pilot.

Jake (Marc Herrmann) is the handsome guy who has a go-nowhere warehouse job where he works for his constantly critical mother-in-law, Margaret (Diane Robin). Jake has decided to make some changes in his life, starting with learning how to fly.

And finally, Annie (Anna Marie Dobbins) is Jake’s wife. They’ve been married for six years and, unfortunately, they’ve hit a rough patch. Annie is busy going to school and Jake is constantly fighting with Annie’s mother. When Jake tells Annie that she sounds just like her mother, Annie exiles him to the living room couch and good for her! Annie likes to wear pink. In particular, she likes to wear a pink hat, which is something that comes back to haunt both her and Jake later on in the movie.

Jake decides to hire Tanya to teach him how to fly. This quickly turns out to be a mistake because, while Tanya is a good teacher, she’s also totally obsessed with Jake. After Jake tells her that he and Annie had a fight the night before, Tanya flies him out to Palm Springs and suggests that they spend the night at a hotel. Jake eventually turns her down but later on, during one of their lessons, Tanya has Jake fly over his house. He looks down and he sees a strange man kissing a woman wearing a pink hat in the driveway. Is Annie cheating on him!?

Realizing that things are just getting too strange, Jake attempts to switch over to a different flight instructor. That flight instructor is named Gonzo (Damon K. Sperber) and he is, without a doubt, one of the greatest supporting characters to ever appear in a Lifetime movie. Gonzo lives up to his name, dressing like an old World War II pilot and then doing dangerous stunts in an old school biplane while his employees — who are all wearing retro purple flight attendant uniforms — assure everyone watching that flying is safer than driving. I won’t go into what happens to Gonzo but let’s just say that Tanya has a way of getting what she wants.

Anyway, Deadly Mile High Club is a lot of fun. It’s one of those Lifetime films that fully embraces the melodrama and goes cheerfully over the top with a wink and a smile. Tanya is the type of psycho who has no problem trying to trick someone into pushing their wife out of a plane and the entire cast appears to be having a ball with their crazed characters. Allison McAtee especially does a great job as the unhinged Tanya and she delivers all of her lines with just the right amount of menace and humor. Deadly Mile High Club is an entertaining film, one that takes the usual Lifetime tropes of the psycho stalker and the clueless husband and the loyal wife and which bring new life to them by putting them up in the sky. It’s also a film that has a nicely self-aware sense of humor, which makes it all the more fun to watch.

Deadly Mile High Club was on last night and it will undoubtedly be on again so keep an eye out for it. And definitely, keep watching the skies!