What Lisa Watched Last Night #230: Match, Meet, Murder (dir by Nicholas Treeshin)

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, around 3 in the morning, I watched the Lifetime film, Match, Meet, Murder!

Why Was I Watching It?

It was late, I had insomnia, and the title just spoke to me. What can I say? I had many reasons for my decision and I don’t regret it for a minute.

What Was It About?

Ruby (Stephanie Sy) is a lingerie designer who has been in a dating slump ever since ending her long-term relationship with independent journalist Luke (Erik Athavale). Ruby’s friend, photographer Ella (Amanda Austin), gives her a secret code for the very exclusive Rima dating app. Soon, Ruby is matched with Dylan (Jacob Blair).

Dylan, it turns out, is a bit of celebrity. He was the winning contestant on a reality show hosted by notorious matchmaker, Jules (Lisa Marie DiGiacinto). The season may have ended with Dylan getting engaged but his new fiancée mysteriously vanished. Now, Dylan is dating Ruby and he doesn’t seem to be quite stable. He still has his ex’s clothes hanging in his bedroom closet. Run, Ruby, run!

What Worked?

I absolutely loved the demented performance of Lisa Marie DiGiacinto, who played Jules the matchmaker. I can’t say too much about it without spoiling the film but I will say that DiGiacinto fully understood the importance of embracing the melodrama in a film like this.

Some of Ruby’s lingerie designs were cute. The black bralette was adorable. Of course, I’d never be able to wear it because I actually have boobs.

What Did Not Work?

I’m usually willing to suspend my disbelief when it comes to a Lifetime film because the melodrama is usually the point. That said, I had a hard time believing that any successful woman could be as clueless as Ruby. She acted as if the concepts of both dating apps and reality TV were entirely new to her. I could excuse her dating app confusion because her character was said to be coming out of a long term relationship. But, seriously — not knowing about a reality television show? The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are inescapable, whether you watch them or not. I haven’t been able to really sit down and watch Love Island but it only takes a few minutes of me scrolling twitter before I feel as if I have.

As well, it took Ruby way too long to figure out that there might be something strange about Dylan’s previous girlfriend disappearing. Discovering her clothes still hanging in his closet? That’s a bit too obvious of a red flag to be shrugged off for as long as she did.

“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments

Lingerie designer is definitely one of my fallback options if the whole movie-watching writer thing doesn’t work out. I will also say that I related to the shock of the assistant who introduced Ruby to reality television and was shocked to discover just how little Ruby apparently knew about pop culture.

Lessons Learned

If a guy you barely know has all of his ex’s clothes still hanging in his closet, run! To be honest, you shouldn’t need a movie to learn that lesson.

Lisa Cleans Out Her DVR: Girls Night Out (dir by Philippe Gagnon)

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, before I went to bed, I continued to clean out my DVR by watching a Lifetime film, Girls Night Out. I recorded Girls Night Out off of the Lifetime Movie Network on January 22nd. It was the earliest recording on my DVR.

Girls Night Out tells the story of McKenzie (MacKenzie Mauzy) and three of her closest friends. They’ve been close since college. They were all in the same sorority. They have a long history laughs, pranks, fun, and barely concealed resentment. Now, they have all graduated and they’ve all found individual success. McKenzie is marrying Reese (Cody Ray Thompson), who is nice but kind of boring.

While her friends take McKenzie out to celebrate, Reese runs into a guy at a bar. Brandon (Jacob Blair) seems nice but he’s not! In college, Brandon used to date McKenzie. But, one night, after getting her drunk, Brandon raped McKenzie. When McKenzie reported him, Brandon was kicked out of school. He lost all of his friends at his fraternity. He lost his chance to play in the NFL. Brandon wants revenge and that revenge starts with kidnapping Reese.

Brandon announces that, unless McKenzie and her friends follow his every order, he will kill Reese. He divides the four of them into two teams and then has them recreate extreme versions of some of the pranks they played in college. One team is sent searching for thrown-away food and used condoms. One team is ordered to sneak into a morgue and kiss a corpse. One friend has to strip down to her underwear while her teammate writes on her with a marker. Meanwhile, the other two friends have to go buy crack. And that’s only the beginning…

Girl’s Night Out is a film that asks, “How far would you go for your friends?” That’s the question that I found myself wondering as I watched. I never joined a sorority but, when I was in college, I had a group of friends who were like sisters to me. I called us the SBS, which stands for Sexy Bitch Squad. My friend Lea used to call us the BNC, which stood for Big Nose Crew, which I think was her sweet way of trying to make me feel better about my own nose. But regardless of what we were called, we were and are extremely close. So, I could definitely relate to the scenes involving the bachelorette party and the male strippers.

But, I asked myself, if someone’s fiancée was being held prisoner and being threatened with murder, would I go to the same lengths as the characters in Girls Night Out?

Probably not.

I mean, seriously — climbing into the dumpster and looking for a used condom? Ewwww. Kiss a corpse? No way! But, luckily, I know that none of the members of SBS (or the BNC) would ever ask me to. They know me well enough to know better. That’s the great thing about friendship. You don’t have to pretend like you’d wear high heels in a crack house just to keep your friend’s boyfriend from being murdered. You can be yourself, flaws and all.

As for the rest of Girls Night Out … well, it took it a while but it won me over. At first, everyone in the film seemed so shallow that I had a hard time imagining how I could ever have any sympathy for them. But then Brandon showed up and was such a hateful character (and Jacob Blair did such a good job of bringing this loathsome jerk to life) that I found myself really looking forward to seeing him get his comeuppance. Let’s face it — we’ve all had a Brandon in our lives and our greatest regret is that we never go a chance to witness him getting repeatedly kicked in his genitals. Knowing that Brandon would eventually get his ass kicked was more than enough to keep me watching the film.

It took a while but seeing Brandon get what he deserved made the film more than worth watchiing.

Hallmark Review: The Reckoning (2015, dir. Mark Jean)

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

Jeez! That title card is even more generic looking than the one for Erotic Ink.

This movie picks up where The Confession left off. Katie is now rich, but remembers to remind us she’s Amish in case we’ve forgotten.

Is it in bad taste to use that particular screenshot after referencing the movie Erotic Ink? Nah, that movie was all one on one so it’s okay.

At least this time she doesn’t just flat out tell us she’s Amish. Actress Katie Leclerc can also do her fake Pennsylvania Dutch accent throughout the whole movie. Thank god! It doesn’t make it any less fake, but at least she doesn’t magically drop it like she did in The Confession. And neither is there a lady in the movie playing an actress playing an Amish girl doing a fake accent that we are supposed to recognize as fake. Since this movie is just a retread of a typical Hallmark romance with a bonnet thrown on it, here’s the wrong guy.

Oh, remember Daniel Fisher played by Cameron Deane Stewart in The Confession with wonder and a blind love for Katie? Yeah, he had to go because it’s imperative we replace him with the Jesus archetype family man guy played by Jacob Blair.

He even works as a carpenter in this movie. Speaking of characters who aren’t played by the same actor again.

Remember Katie’s biological mother played by Sherry Stringfield? Well, that picture is all you’ll see of her character in this movie. By that, I mean you won’t see her again, but you will hear a voiceover from her done by a different actress later in the movie.

So let’s lay out the plot. Katie decides to invest in a place Oak Vale: Home For Boys. A guy who worked as a janitor and grew up in homes like Oak Vale shows up and is hired as a counselor. Fisher shows up to tell Katie he’s not dead.

As you can see she takes it quite well. Of course Fisher starts working on the boys home. Gotta have someway for him to spend time around Katie!

Oh, there’s also a little subplot involving Katie’s adopted parents, but really it’s just there to tie up that loose end so that they can show up at the end of the movie.

The movie is about a girl moving forward with a marriage to the wrong guy while hanging around the right guy and helping this boys home out. Also, in reminding us she’s Amish.

I must say that as much as having the kids raise this barn to get them doing something positive together is a good idea, the size of it does make me chuckle.

Everything else is exactly what you expect from a Hallmark romance movie. If you think about it for a bit you can even figure out who the janitor turned counselor is. Some of the shots are quite nice. Oddly, once again, this Hallmark movie reminded me of another late night cable movie called Passionate Intentions which also had similarly nice cinematography.

All in all, it works well enough. Just know that the Amish bit really has nothing to do with anything and that this movie really exists just to give closure to this series of movies. Now I just need to watch The Shunning so that I will have reviewed all the movies in the series. Unfortunately, I can’t con my Dad into watching that one with me after watching this one. That means I’ll get to it eventually after the many more I have sitting on my DVR and the even more to be recorded in the coming months.