Ever since the start of this month, I have been cleaning out my DVR and I am happy to say that I’ve managed to go from only having 9 hours of space available to now having 17 hours.  Progress is a wonderful thing!

Last night, I decided, after watching Picnic, to take a two-hour break from watching movies that I had recorded off of TCM.  Instead, I watched a film that I recorded off of Lifetime way back in January, The Wrong Car.

If you’ve watched enough Lifetime movies, you know that there are three things that all Lifetime movies distrust: men, teenagers, and technology.  The Wrong Car doesn’t feature any teenagers but it does feature some really bad men who use technology to do some really bad things.  In the past, Lifetime has exposed the dangers of Facebook, Match.com, twitter, and YouTube.  With this movie, they take on Uber.

Except, of course, they don’t actually call it Uber.  Instead, they call it “NetCar.”  But it’s totally Uber.

Trudy (Danielle Savre) is a law student who doesn’t have much of a social life because she is always either too busy studying or arguing that criminals can be reformed.  Her best friend, Gretchen (Francia Raisa), is constantly begging her to go out and have a good time but Trudy refuses.  (Isn’t that always the role of a best friend in a Lifetime movie?)  Finally, Gretchen is somehow able to convince Trudy to go to a club with her.  However, Trudy get bored and decides to leave.  Standing outside the club, she calls for a NetCar.

Usually, whenever Trudy uses NetCar, her driver is another law student named Charles (Kevin G. Cox).  However, this time, she doesn’t know the driver.  However, she still gets in the car and accepts his offer of bottled water.  The next thing that Trudy knows, she’s waking up naked in a totally sleazy motel.

With the police unable to help, Trudy takes matters into her own hands.  In this case, that means that she decides to become a NetCar driver herself.  She now spends her time driving around the city, looking for the man who raped her.  Along the way, she lectures two women about proper car safety, deals with an angry but later helpful criminal, and meets a cute investment manager (Jackson Davis).

She also has flashbacks to her rape and these are pure nightmare fuel.  The man who assaulted her is frequently seeing wearing a giant baby mask, much like the one pictured below:

Technically, the scene above is from Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian satire Brazil.  But it’s the same baby mask!  AGCK!

To be honest, though, the entire film is nightmare fuel.  The Wrong Car is one of the few genuinely disturbing Lifetime films that I’ve ever seen because it does get at some very important truths.  We all give out way too much information about ourselves to total strangers.  And, much like Trudy, I probably would have gotten into that NetCar and drank that bottled water.  Nobody wants to spend their life paranoid but The Wrong Car suggests that perhaps a little paranoia might be justified.

Director John Stimpson fills the screen with shadowy and menacing images while Danielle Savre does an excellent job in the sometimes difficult role of Trudy.  The entire film is well-cast, with Rhett Kidd turning in a memorable performance in the small role of the world’s sleaziest desk clerk.  And that baby mask … at the risk of repeating myself, AGCK!

The Wrong Car is definitely a Lifetime film to keep an eye out for.