Henderson Wade | Through the Shattered Lens

(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR! It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet. So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR! She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by Thanksgiving, November 24th! Will she make it? Keep checking the site to find out!)

The first film that I watched in my latest quest to clean out my DVR was Unwanted Guest, a Lifetime film that I recorded off of the Lifetime Movie Network on October 22nd.

Unwanted Guest tells a familiar Lifetime story. A seemingly innocent and deceptively mousey college student, Amy (Kate Mansi), is invited to spend the holiday break at the home of her best friend, Christine (Valentina Novakovic). It seems like a nice thing to do, right? After all, Amy says that her family is in Europe and Christine is still struggling to adjust to having a new stepfather. Amy gets a place to stay and Christine gets a friend. It’s a win win, right?

Well, no, not quite.

When we first meet Amy, she’s wearing glasses, no makeup, and seems to be kind of meek. It doesn’t take a psychic to know that Amy will soon take off her glasses, let down her hair, and start wandering around in lingerie. However, even beyond that, Amy is soon drugging Christine, tricking Christine’s mother into falling off a stool, and seducing Christine’s stepfather.

(When he asks her why she’s wandering around the house in just a t-shirt, Amy replies, “If my shirt bothers you, I can take it off.”)

Of course, Amy’s not just manipulative. She’s also a murderer. In fact, it’s surprising the amount of people that she kills over the course of one holiday break. I always find it kind of odd how skilled people in Lifetime movies are when it comes to killing people. I mean, Amy even knows how to disable the brakes on someone’s car! I wouldn’t even know where to begin! I mean, how do you learn stuff like that? Wikipedia, I guess.

Of course, Amy doesn’t just kill people. There’s also a really icky scene where she kills a hamster. If you didn’t already dislike Amy, you will after the hamster scene.

Unwanted Guest is not just a Lifetime film. It’s also a Fred Olen Ray film and, even by his standards, it’s deliriously and wonderfully over-the-top. One thing that I always like about Fred Olen Ray’s films is that they make no excuses for what they are. Unwanted Guest is so unapologetically melodramatic and joyfully tawdry that it’s impossible not to enjoy it. This is one of those films that you watch and you think, “Surely, they’re not going to go there…” and then, suddenly and without apology, they do! It’s a lot of fun.

Add to that, Kate Mansi does a really good job in the role of Amy. If there’s a Hall of Fame for Lifetime movie psychos, Amy deserves to be included!

(Lisa is currently in the process of trying to clean out her DVR by watching and reviewing all 40 of the movies that she recorded from the start of March to the end of June. She’s trying to get it all done by July 10th! Will she make it!? Keep visiting the site to find out!)

The 16th film on my DVR was The Cheerleader Murders and what can I say other than, “Yay!” No, no — it’s not that I dislike cheerleaders. While I did frequently turn down the chance to become a cheerleader while I was in high school, that was solely because my sister, our own Dazzling Erin, was already a cheerleader and I was going through one of my “I want to be known for being myself” phases. No, I was excited about rewatching The Cheerleader Murders because I remembered that this was one of the best films to ever premiere on Lifetime!

As I started to watch The Cheerleader Murders, I found myself wondering whether it would stand up to a second viewing.

Well, it more than stood up. If anything, The Cheerleader Murders is even better the second time around!

The Cheerleader Murders plays out like an odd combination of YA fiction and disturbing horror. The film opens with a few scenes of disaster and what’s interesting is that, while all of the scenes are tragic, they’re also darkly humorous. We see a car full of cheerleaders and jocks crash, killing everyone inside. We see the prom king and queen falling to their death while trying to get the perfect selfie. As these disasters play out, we hear our narrator, Ellie (Samantha Boscarino), explaining that her hometown is cursed. It’s all so cheerfully morbid that, from the minute it began, I was in love with this film.

What’s that? Oh, you don’t believe that Ellie and her town are cursed? Well, just consider this. When Ellie was thirteen, her older sister broke up with her boyfriend. So the boyfriend broke into the house, killed her sister, and then shot Ellie’s father as Ellie watched!

THAT’S A CURSE RIGHT THERE!

Jump forward three years later. Ellie is now a 16 year-old cheerleader. She’s popular and she’s also a good student. Though you have to wonder about the standards of her high school because she goes to one of those Lifetime high schools where no one ever has to actually go to class or anything like that. Instead, everyone hangs out at the lockers and gossips. Even better, if you do go to class, you can apparently just walk out whenever you want. This happens several times during this film and we never actually hear a teacher say anything like, “Wait! You can’t just stand up and walk out of class just because your friend is motioning to you from the hallway!”

Ellie has everything but she’s still convinced that she’s cursed. If she’s not cursed then how do you explain the mysterious disappearance of two her fellow cheerleaders? Admittedly, one of the cheerleaders is found rather quickly. Or, I should say, her bloody, severed foot is found rather quickly. Someone spots it off the side of the road. (The camera zooms in on the big toe so that we can see the heart that she painted on her the nail. That’s the type of cheerfully over-the-top film that The Cheerleader Murders is.) The other cheerleader eventually shows up in orange grove, being chased by a masked man with a huge knife.

Like any good YA heroine, Ellie is determined to solve the mystery. Fortunately, she has help. Her dead father shows up occasionally and offers up cryptic advice. Ellie also has frequent dreams, some of which are rather dark and disturbing by Lifetime standards.

The more that Ellie digs into the mystery, the more obvious it becomes that she knows absolutely no one who isn’t sleazy or insane. Who killed the cheerleaders? Was it the school weirdo or the two jealous nerds who are always gossiping about the dead? Maybe it was the coach, who was apparently having an affair with both a cheerleader and Ellie’s favorite teacher. Or perhaps that teacher got jealous and decided to seek revenge! And, come to think of it, Ellie’s boyfriend seems like he might have some issues too. And, of course, there’s Ellie. Who is to say that the curse hasn’t driven her insane? It’s hard not to notice that, whenever the killer strikes, Ellie is usually riding her bicycle right past the crime scene.

One of the more interesting things about the film is that no one else at the high school seems to be that upset over the dead cheerleaders. The school year goes on. The remaining cheerleaders continue to cheer at all the football games and, with the exception of Ellie, nobody even seems to shed a single tear over all the teenagers dying in town. Along with the ghosts and the nightmares and the constant shots of Ellie intensely riding her bicycle from crime scene to crime scene, all of this conspires to give The Cheerleader Murders an oddly surreal feel.

The Cheerleader Murders is one of my favorite Lifetime film because it literally has no boundaries. There is no moment too over-the-top that this film cannot find an excuse to include it. The acting is good, the horror (and there is horror) is effective, and the mystery is cheerfully ludicrous. Make sure you catch The Cheerleader Murders the next time it’s on Lifetime because seriously, this film is a classic!

(By the way, I made Erin watch The Cheerleader Murders with me when it originally aired. She said it was actually a pretty accurate portrayal of the life of a cheerleader, except for the murders.)