(I recorded Nightmare Best Friend off of Lifetime on December 29th.)

Everyone’s had that one best friend.

She was the one who gave you the courage to flirt with the hot ones and roll your eyes at the strange ones.  She was the one who taught you how to shoplift without getting caught.  She was there when you had your first drink and the first time you got high.  She was the first one you went to for advice.  She was the one that called when you needed to cry.  She was your sister in almost every way and you swore that the two of you would be best friends forever.

Then you graduated high school and you two drifted apart.  Sure, you’re Facebook friends and you follow each other on twitter and occasionally, you might exchange greetings and an inside joke but it’s not the same.  Usually, it’s a case that one of you has grown up while the other hasn’t.  One of you is busy adulting while the other is still living for the moment.  Though neither one of you admit it, your friendship has now become consumed with a mix of jealousy and barely concealed malice.  You want her life.  She wants your life.  It’s perhaps best that you live in separate states now.

And then one day, your former best friend shows up on your doorstep and all Hell breaks loose….

That’s the situation in which Katy (Rosslyn Luke) finds herself in Nightmare Best Friend.  Katy has a nice house, a nice life, and a nice family.  She’s living the ideal suburban lifestyle.  And then, one day, her old friend Gina (Jackie Moore) shows up.

At first, Katy is excited to see Gina.  They go back to their old high school and run through the hallways, screaming.  They talk about how wild they used to be.  Gina even tries to convince Katy to take part in a little shoplifting.  It’s all wonderful, until Gina’s boyfriend, Ray (Brandon Howell) shows up.  Katy takes an instant dislike to Ray.  (It probably has something to do with the knife that he’s always waving around.)  For his part, Ray doesn’t seem to care much for Katy either.  However, he needs Katy.  It turns out that Ray is a criminal and to pull off his latest scam, he’s going to require Katy to help him whether Katy wants to or not.

Nightmare Best Friend features two excellent lead performances from Rosslyn Luke and Jackie Moore and a convincingly menacing one from Brandon Howell.  Howell played Ray with just the right combination of bad boy charm and psychotic posturing.  You could understand why Gina fell for him, while at the same time also understanding why Gina would be too scared to defy him.  Even more importantly, the friendship between Gina and Katy felt real.  You could imagine that two of them actually being friends in high school but you could just as easily understand why they had eventually drifted apart.  Elevated by a trio of strong performances, Nightmare Best Friend is an enjoyable Lifetime melodrama.