Mark Rendall | Through the Shattered Lens

On Friday night, I turned over to the Lifetime Movie Network and I watched the latest Lifetime premiere, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!

Why Was I Watching It?

Because it was on Lifetime, of course!

Usually, I make it a point to watch every single Lifetime film. Unfortunately, last year, I got a bit sidetracked and I missed quite a few. I’m determined to not let that happen this year. I’ve got quite a few curretly on the DVR and since I’m going to be working from home for at least next month (thank you very much, Coronavirus panic), I’m looking forward to getting to watch them all. Since No Good Deed Goes Unpunished was the first Lifetime premiere since I returned home from my vacation, there was no way I was going to miss it.

What Was It About?

Karen (Michelle Borth) has some problems. Her husband just recently died and, despite the help from her sister-in-law Sophie (Cristina Rosato), Karen is having trouble holding it all together. She’s struggling financially, to the extent that she’s actually had to take in a border, Calvin (Oliver Price). Calvin has taken over the room that used to belong to Karen’s resentful, young son, Max (Noah James Turcotte). Karen is up for a big promotion at work but everyone but Karen can see that the obvious favorite for the job is the sleazy Lance (Jason Deline). Lance is an old friend of the boss and, of course, he’s also a man.

One night, while Karen’s at the grocery store, she finds herself in the middle of an attempted robbery. When the robber points the gun at another shopper, Jeremy (Mark Rendall), Karen steps in and basically saves Jeremy’s life. After the police show up, Karen just wants to forget about the whole thing and move on with her life. However, Jeremy is now obsessed with Karen and he has decided that he’s going to do whatever it takes to become a part of her life….

As the title says: No good deed goes unpunished!

What Worked?

So, I absolutely loved this movie.

Seriously, this was one of the best psycho stalker films to ever premiere on the Lifetime Movie Network. Not only did the plot fully embrace the melodrama (which is always the key to any successful Lifetime film) but it featured some pretty good performances from Michelle Borth, Mark Rendall, and Christina Rosato to boot! Mark Rendall played Jeremy with a creepy smile and an unhinged eagerness to please and it was a lot of fun to watch him and wonder just how far he was going to go to try to get close to Karen and Max.

One thing that I really liked about this movie is that, from the minute she first met Jeremy, Karen was like, “Okay, this guy is weird.” So many Lifetime films are overly dependent on everyone acting like an idiot until the final third of the movie. Not so with this one. Karen suspects that Jeremy has issues from the start. What makes Jeremy an effective villain is that, even though almost everyone wants him to leave, they somehow can’t ever seem to make it happen. Jeremy slides into their lives and basically just refuses to go away.

I also liked Oliver Price’s performance as the hilariously entitled Calvin. Calvin was like every boomer’s nightmare of what my generation is like and Price appeared to be having a lot of fun with the role. His incredulous look of shock when Karen demanded that he actually pay his rent was one of my favorite moments.

What Did Not Work?

It all worked! This was a great Lifetime film.

“Oh my God! Just Like Me!” Moments

I totally related to Sophie, who had a good attitude and absolutely no fear of suggesting that a young child walk home and cook his own dinner. I know that some people would say that was irresponsible on her part but I like to think that she was preparing Max for life in the real world. You can’t always depend on your wacky aunt to come pick you up after karate class. When she has things that she would rather do, you need to be able to get back home and make yourself something to eat without burning down the apartment.

My other favorite Sophie moment was when her sister demanded to know if she was high and Sophie waited like two minutes before replying that she was. Seriously, if someone asks you if you’re high and you hesitate by answering, you might as well just say “yes” because everyone knows.

Sophie deserves her own movie.

Lessons Learned:

Don’t ever save anyone’s life. It’s just not worth all the trouble afterwards. Don’t be a hero as the movie villains like to say.

30 Days of Night is pretty much a siege movie with heavy elements of horror and gore. Siege movies always succeed and fail depending on whether the tension and dread built up from the beginning of the film suspends the audience’s disbelief. Siege films like The Thing and Romero’s Living Dead trilogy works well because right from the get-go we see the tension build not just on the location the cast are put in but within the besieged survivors as well. Survival becomes that much more difficult due to human frailties and an inability to work together bringing the whole group down. The monsters outside are bad enough, but sometimes it’s the survivors themselves who must share the blame.

David Slade’s (director of the excellent Hard Candy) movie does a very good job of bringing the initial tension and dread the comic brought to life in its first chapter. The story takes place in Barrow, Alaska which happens to be located within the Arctic Circle. This location allows it a very peculiar yearly event of having pitch-black night which lasts for a period of an entire month. The movie begins just as the town of Barrow prepares for this month-long prolonged night. Most of the town decide to move down south for the month where the night doesn’t last as long, but enough stay in Barrow to give it a semblance of life and activity.

The build-up of the characters in 30 Days of Night marks one of the weaknesses in the film. There’s barely much characterization in distinguishing one Barrow, Alaskan from another. The lack in character development from all the characters whether human or vampire doesn’t invest the film with anyone we want to see make it out through the night and into dawn. Even Danny Huston, a very underrated and overly capable actor in past films fails to elevate his lead vampire character Marlowe beyond it’s genre trappings. Known only as The Stranger in the credits, Ben Foster’s Renfield-like character edges between caricature and genuine creepiness in his performance. Foster knows he’s in a genre movie and has fun with the character. He’s the only one to truly take on his character and roll with it.

I now get to the subject of the vampires themselves. Most vampire movies seem enamored in portraying the vampire as some sort of seductive, fashion-obsessed, or in the case of the Anne Rice-type anachronistic in their dress, with an unnatural immortality they either live as hedonistically as possible or bemoan their cursed existence. Then there’s the more recent trend that Twilight has brought into the vampire mythology and it’s not good. There’s never been a true portrayal of the vampire as a pure, hunger-driven monster with an appetite to match their status as one of folklore and legend’s top-tier boogeymen. Slade goes for speed and agility in his vampires instead of hypnotizing and mesmerizing their victims. The vampires in this movie owes much to the frenetic and over-amped infecteds of 28 Days Later.

The attack itself and the subsequent siege worked well enough in the early going. There were some great overhead shots of the town’s people losing it’s fight during the initial feeding frenzy as the camera shoots the scene high overhead. The only thing Slade had a misstep in terms of the siege itself was after those first couple of nights. The rest of the 30 days didn’t seem to show enough desperation on the faces and bodies of the last few survivors. Really, the only way the audience even knew a couple weeks have passed were the caption telling them how many days into the month-long night has passed. I think with some better editing and a better sense of structure in the middle section of the movie to show time actually progressing the movie would’ve been better on so many levels.

All in all, 30 Days of Night was just good enough to be a fun watch. The premise itself was original and put a new spin on the vampire genre that has rarely been tapped. The performances were pretty average with no one bringing the whole film down with a misstep performance or raising the bar with a great one. The final product had a chance to be something great, but just ends up being a good and original take on the vampire story with elements of Night of the Living Dead.