Lifetime Film Review: Engaged To A Psycho (dir by Sam Irvin)

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After dating for a very long time, Deanna (Anna Hutchison) and Karl (Jason-Shane Scott) are finally getting married!

Yay! Everyone loves a big wedding!

And, even before Karl asks Deanna to marry him, he’s purchased a large house for them to live in!

Yay! Everyone loves a big house!

But first, Deanna needs to meet Karl’s family and that means going to an even bigger house!

YAY! EVERYONE LOVES AN EVEN BIGGER HOU….

Wait a minute …. Deanna hasn’t met Karl’s family, yet?

Seriously, everyone, that should be a big red flag. I don’t care how rich your boyfriend is, you don’t accept his marriage proposal before you’ve met his family. After all, his family could be …. well, the could be crazy. Or they might meet you and then decide that they don’t like you or maybe they like you but they still think that their son (or brother or stepbrother) could do better. Or — and this especially happens in Lifetime movie — someone might start murdering all the members of your wedding party.

All of that happens in Engaged To A Psycho. Engaged To A Psycho premiered on the Lifetime Movie Network back in May but, according to the imdb, the film was actually around a while before making it’s official LMN premiere. It played in Canada back in 2018 and then, in 2019, it showed up on television in the UK, Spain, and France. At the time, it was known as Murder at the Mansion. By the time it premiered here in the States, the name had been changed to Engaged To A Psycho. (Lifetime was going through a Psycho cycle. Try saying that six times fast.)

Anyway, regardless of the title, Engaged To A Psycho is a fun little movie. As soon as Deanna shows up at, she meets Karl’s mother, Ivy (Audrey Landers) and his adopted sister, Ruby (Melissa Bolona). Ivy makes it clear that she thinks her son could have done better than Deanna. Ruby, meanwhile, is almost too friendly and seems to be trying way too hard to convince Deanna that Deanna is welcome in the family. It soon becomes obvious, than even though the family is living in a gigantic mansion, the rooms and the hallways are full of secrets, lies, and murder. Soon people are dying all over the place.

One thing I liked about Engaged To A Psycho is that there were plenty of POV shots from the killer’s point of view. It gave the whole a film a sort of giallo feel while also hiding the killer’s identity. It also led to a lot of scenes of people looking straight at the camera and saying stuff like, “I knew it was you! Wait here while I go tell everyone!” Well, needless to say, the killer isn’t big on waiting.

The other thing I liked about Engaged To A Psycho is that it had a sense of humor about itself. Ivy is so extremely unimpressed by Deanna that it actually becomes rather hilarious how dismissive she is. It doesn’t matter how many times Deanna nearly gets killed, Ivy refuses to accept her word that there’s something strange going on.

I liked Engaged to a Psycho. There were a lot of murders, a lot of archly delivered dialogue, and a lot of big houses. What more can you ask for?

Film Review: Wrong Swipe (dir by Matthew Leutwyler)

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The image above is a still from a film called Wrong Swipe. The women are sisters. Anna (Anna Hutchison, who may be best known for playing doomed Jules in The Cabin In The Woods) is an uptight law school student who spends way too much time studying. Her sister, Sasha (Karissa Lee Staples), decides that Anna desperately needs to get laid so she goads her into downloading the Swipe app.

What’s Swipe?

Well, for one thing, it’s an app with a really bad name. But, beyond that, it’s kinda like Match.com for people who specifically want to run the risk of being stalked by a psycho. If a user finds a profile that she likes, she “swipes” the profile. The app uses the phone’s GPS to send you an alert whenever someone who you’ve swiped is nearby.

“Your crush is 100 feet away…”

So, Anna joins Swipe. In order to make sure that her sister understand how it all works, Sasha decides to swipe some random guy’s profile. That random guy just happens to be Todd (Blake Berris), the creepy guy who sits behind Anna in her criminal justice class. Now, Todd thinks that Anna has a crush on him.

“You swiped me!” Todd says, at one point.

Anna goes on a few other Swipe dates. She reconnects with a guy she vaguely knew in high school, Nate (Kevin Joy) but it turns out that Nate is kind of a jerk and plus, he attempts to drug her drink during their date. Uh-oh, Nate’s not a good guy!

Then Anna meets Pete (Philipp Karner). Pete is sweet and sensitive and handsome. Anna and he have an immediate connection and, as you watch them together, you just know that they’re eventually going to end up in a commercial for Swipe.com. Anna and Pete will be sitting in front of a fireplace. Anna will say, “I joined Swipe.com and two days later, look what I found.” And then Pete will say…

Well, actually, Pete won’t say anything. Pete ends up getting murdered. Sorry, Anna. Could Pete’s murder be somehow connected to the anonymous threatening messages that Anna has been getting ever since she joined Swipe?

In case you hadn’t already guessed, Wrong Swipe is a Lifetime film. It aired on February 13th, just in time for Valentine’s Day. There are a few things that you can always be sure about when it comes to Lifetime films. You can always be sure that men will be untrustworthy, mom will always be right, and the bonds of sisterhood will never be broken. You can also always be sure that using any sort of technology will lead to grave misfortune. I’ve lost track of how many Lifetime films I’ve seen about terrible things happening as a result of someone spending too much time online.

(It’s kinda like that film Disconnect, except more fun and less preachy.)

With Wrong Swipe, Lifetime exposes the dangers of online dating for the hundredth time. At this point, Lifetime has gone from being Television For Women to being the “You Kids And Your Goddamn Gadgets!” Network. That said, there’s a certain charm to how predictable it all is. Lifetime is all about the melodrama and Wrong Swipe has plenty of that. It may be familiar but it’s comfortable at the same time.

Wrong Swipe was probably at its best when it dealt with the bond between Anna and Sasha. Their relationship reminded me of my relationship with my sisters. At the same time, it was hard not to wonder how Anna could possibly have randomly met so many weird men in such a short amount of time. One of them, of course, had to be weird because he was the psycho who was stalking her. But the others were just red herrings who all happened to act like psychos even if they weren’t the psycho. In fact, all of the men were so over-the-top in their suspicious behavior that it actually made it easy to figure out who the stalker was because he was the only suspect who wasn’t totally and completely obvious.

One final note: Wrong Swipe is unique for actually showing Anna doing a Google search. Usually, Lifetime films will come up with a fake search engine for its characters to use but Wrong Swipe went ahead and just used google. That said, Anna was not using quotation marks when she typed in her search terms so it probably took her far longer than necessary to find what she was looking for.

As for whether or not you should make it a point to see Wrong Swipe the next time it comes on TV … eh. It’s nothing special but if you enjoy Lifetime films, it’s okay.

Spoilers Review of The Cabin In The Woods

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Viktor VonGlum

Originally I wasn’t going watch this because of pathological hatred of Zucking Fombies. Fortunately, Arleigh told me that it was more than those wretched Zucking Fombies. The Cabin In The Woods is sheer brilliance because Whedon and Goddard turned the tired and cliched horror formula on its ear. Their collaboration freed us from the oppression of torture porn and loathsome gore for the sake of gory credo.

**Spoilers begin here**

In this film world, every horror film nightmare creature from the shambling zombies to snarling werewolf to a Cenobite analogue to Lovecraftian elder gods exist. As a fan of Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer series, I couldn’t help but see similarities between the TCITW’s world and the world of the Slayer. So the description, “It’s like an episode of Buffy with gore, cussing, and naughty bits, but no Buffy Summers” is pretty accurate. The presence of Amy Acker (Winifred “Fred” Burkle) from Angel fame cemented this opinion. The film cast could easily be stand-ins for the Scoobies with Marty playing Xander Harris, David as Riley, Dana as Willow, etc. The mysterious shadow organization could easily be division of Wolfram & Hart and the slumbering elder gods could replace the Senior Partners as well as Buffy’s Big Bad. I found it interesting and clever that the token victims served as the required sacrifice to appease slumbering boogie men because it explained why the fool, the virgin, the scholar, the jock, and the party girl are always the victims of horror movies. I also loved that the grumpy old man that cryptically warns the kids also served a purpose.

The film is also reminiscent of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe in the sense that the evil and violence had a higher purpose. The nightmare creatures could easily be Ogrdu Hem carrying out the will of their parents, the Ogdru Jahad. The secret organization had the dual role of the BPRD and Rasputin. They were like the BPRD in the sense they prevented the end of the world and captured/contained/employed the things that go bump in the night. They were like Rasputin because they reverenced the elder beings and paid them annual tribute.

Found the following things interesting:

The plot to keep the elder gods happy was a global one (other nations like Japan were involved).
The wide range of monsters that the organization captured (made me wonder how they were able to capture the most lethal ones like the Cenobite wannabe, werewolf, soul stealing ghost, etc).
The causal office vibe the organization had despite their morbid mission.
The elder gods represented the audience/horror audience (an interesting point brought to my attention by a friend)