Lifetime Film Review: The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate (dir by Mark Gantt)

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, put yourself in this situation.

You’re an aspiring writer, which is a really nice way of saying that you don’t have much money. Because you haven’t paid your rent in four months, you’ve just gotten kicked out of your apartment. As bad as that is, you can take some comfort from the fact that your incredibly hot boyfriend owns a really nice and really big apartment and he probably won’t have any issue with letting you live there. I mean, he’s always eager for you to sleep over so why not just move in? So, you head over to his place to give him the news and….

….some blonde that you’ve never seen before opens the door and asks you who you are!

Okay, now you’re in trouble. Not only do you not have an apartment but you also don’t have a boyfriend. You have no money and you have no family to fall back on. While many writers wrote some of their best work while living in boxcars and drifting across the country, you’re not sure that’s what you want to do with the next few years of your life. So, you get on social media and you let the world know that you need a job. ANY JOB!

That’s what happens to Olivia (Carrie Wampler), the character at the center of The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate. It all happens during the first 10 minutes or so of this movie and it does make Olivia into an instantly likable character. There’s no way that you can’t sympathize with her because everything that could go wrong in her life has gone wrong in just the course of a few hours. When Olivia is contacted by Cassidy (Jordyn Aurora Aquino) and told that there is a job opportunity for her but that it requires Olivia to be discreet, you can’t blame Olivia for jumping at the opportunity. What else is Olivia going to do? Starve?

It turns out that Cassidy works for Ava (Brianne Davis) and Hayden (Carl Beukes) von Richter, a celebrity couple who, after Ava’s last few films flopped at the box office, are now mostly famous for being famous. Ava and Hayden hire Olivia to act as a surrogate to carry their child. Olivia will get $150,000 once the baby is born and she’ll get to stay at Ava and Hayden’s fabulous mansion. The main conditions seem reasonable: Olivia will have to be discreet and she’ll also have to stay healthy and be regularly checked out by Ava’s army of doctors. Olivia agrees.

And, at first, everything seems okay. Ava and Hayden are charming, even if Ava is a bit high-strung and Hayden often seems like he’s lost in thought. Olivia bonds with Cassidy and chef Peter (Kenneth Miller). Ava can be demanding but that makes sense and …. wait, a minute, did Ava just do cocaine in a public restaurant? And what exactly is Hayden doing with that hypodermic needle?

Needless to say, Ava and Hayden are not as perfect as they initially seem and Olivia soon starts to have doubts about whether or not they should even be parents. Hayden, especially, seems to get creepier (and more and more gropey) with each passing day. Soon, that fabulous mansion starts to feel like a prison and Olivia comes to realize that her employers are even more dangerous than she originally suspected….

The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate is a film that’s very much of the moment. We live in a society that is obsessed with celebrities, even faded ones like Ava and Hayden. We also live in a world where ordinary people — like Olivia — can actually connect with celebrities via social media. At the same time, though people may not always be quick to admit it, we all secretly suspect that most celebrities are actually crazy and probably have a dungeon underneath their mansion. Even our favorites are often suspected of harboring dark secrets, as seen by the eagerness of the twitter mob to cancel their former heroes. As such, we can all relate to Olivia’s willingness to be a part of Ava and Hayden’s seemingly glamorous life while, at the time, Ava and Hayden’s “quirks” serve to confirm what we’ve always suspected about what goes on behind closed doors in Beverly Hills and on Park Avenue.

The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate strikes a good balance between thriller and satire. It embraces the melodrama while also retaining enough self-awarness to be fun. Brianne Davis and Carl Beukes are both entertainingly sleazy as the celebrity couple from Hell while Carrie Wampler is sympathetic and likable in the role of Olivia. This is an entertaining Lifetime movie that will be enjoyed by anyone who has ever looked at a celebrity tweet and thought to themselves, “What a weirdo.”

Lifetime Film Review: Saving My Baby (dir by Michael Feifer)

Posted on March 3, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor baby Lilly!

She’s only a few weeks old and her life is already all drama all the time!

First off, Lilly was born slightly premature, shortly after her mother, Sarah (Brianne Davis), was involved in a serious and suspicious auto accident. Then, while her mother is still in a coma, her father, Travis (Jon Prescott), decides to take Lilly and run off to Palm Springs with her. Accompanying Travis is his overprotective mother, Virginia (Kathleen Quinlan) and Jessica (Tonya Kay), who just happens to be the friend who introduced Sarah to Travis in the first place. Speaking of just being friends, that’s what Travis swears that he and Jessica are but we all know that’s not the case. We know this because this is a Lifetime film and it’s rare that anyone’s ever just a friend in the world of Lifetime. Of course, Sarah’s parents and her sister object to Travis taking the baby to Palm Springs but what can they do? He’s the father.

Of course, eventually, Sarah wakes up and she’s like, “Where’s my baby?” When she hears that Lilly has been taken to Palm Springs, she quickly calls up Travis and demands to know what’s going on. Travis assures Sarah that his mother is looking after Lilly and promises that they’ll return the following morning. Sarah then hears Jessica talking in the background.

“IS JESSICA THERE!?” Sarah asks.

Travis, not surprisingly, doesn’t have a quick answer for that.

As should already be obvious, there was a lot more to Sarah and Travis’s whirlwind romance than just love. Unlike the attempted murder, the baby was never a part of the plan. However, now that Lilly’s been born, Travis definitely wants to keep her. Jessica, meanwhile, is concerned about how much Sarah and her family are willing to pay for the return of Baby Lilly….

Kidnapped children are pretty much a staple plot point when it comes to Lifetime movies. That really shouldn’t be surprising. The most effective Lifetime films are the ones that deal, however melodramatically, with real-life fears and what could be more scary than the thought of losing your baby? Whereas other mothers in Lifetime kidnapping films at least get to spend some time with their child before the abduction happens, Sarah wakes up to discover that her baby has been taken to another city. When she desperately asks her sister for information of how the baby looked before she was taken away, it’s a moment of intense emotional honesty.

Saving My Baby is a bit unique among Lifetime kidnapping films in that it actually spend more time with the kidnappers than with the family of the kidnapped. Don’t get me wrong. Sarah is a sympathetic character and Brianne Davis does a good job playing her but the film is far more interested in Jessica, Travis, and Virginia. As played by Jon Pescott, Travis spend most of his screentime wearing the haunted expression of someone who knows that he’s made the biggest mistake of his life. Not only does he have his wife angry at him but his mother won’t stop telling him that he’s a terrible father and his girlfriend keeps demanding that he get rid of both his mother and his daughter. Kathleen Quinlan does a great jon, keeping you guessing about Virginia. You’re never quite sure how much she knows about what Travis and Jessica are planning. However, the film is totally stolen by Tonya Kay, who is like a force of destructive nature in the role of Jessica. Jessica may be evil but you can’t help but sympathize with her frustration at times. I mean, everyone around her is just so incompetent!

Saving My Baby is an entertaining Lifetime kidnapping film. Wisely, the film eventually moves the action to Las Vegas, which is the perfect location for the movie’s melodrama. For the film’s finale, Saving My Baby makes good use of the Nevada desert, with the desolation perfectly capturing the feeling of hopelessness that Sarah’s been feeling ever since the disappearance of her daughter. It all leads to gunfire and tears and hopefully, a lesson learned about letting your no-good son-in-law take your granddaughter to Palm Springs. We can only hope.

What Lisa Watched Last Night #140: Murder in Mexico (dir by Mark Gantt)

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I watched the latest Lifetime original film, Murder in Mexico!

Why Was I Watching It?

I may be on vacation but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to watch and live tweet the latest Lifetime film!

What Was It About?

This was one of those based-on-a-true-crime-story Lifetime productions! Bruce Beresford-Redman (Colin Egglesfield) is a successful reality TV producer who has trouble being loyal to his wife (Leonor Varela). When they take a vacation in Cancun, Bruce’s wife is murdered and Bruce quickly becomes the number one suspect.

What Worked?

Colin Egglesfield and Leonor Varela were both well-cast. Also, the scene where Bruce crosses the Mexico-US border reminded me of the border scenes from No Country For Old Men.

What Did Not Work?

Just speaking as somebody who enjoys live tweeting Lifetime films, it’s always hard to know how to deal with these “true crime” movies. The whole point of live tweeting is to be snarky and that can be difficult when you’re talking about real murderers, real victims, and real children who will now grow up without their mom and knowing their dad is in prison. For that reason, Murder in Mexico was not as fun to live tweet as A Deadly Adoption or The Unauthorized Full House Story.

Beyond that, it was hard not to feel that Bruce Beresford-Redman and his crimes were not worthy of the attention that this movie gave to him. The film attempted to make him interesting by playing up his past as a reality tv producer and trying to maintain some ambiguity as to whether or not Bruce was actually guilty but, ultimately, Bruce just came across as your standard cheating asshole. In the end, both his guilt and his motives were too obvious to be intriguing.

“OH MY GOD! Just. Like. Me!” Moments

In 2008, I went to Cancun for Spring Break and it was a blast! Seriously, I had a great time and did a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t post in public. However, none of those things involved murder and I suppose that’s a good thing.

Lessons Learned

Once a cheater, always a cheater.