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: Sleeping With My Student (dir by Tom Shell)

Posted on November 5, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, here you are.

You’re middle-aged. You’ve just split up with your adulterous husband. Your teenage daughter is upset because she’s about to start at a new school. Even worse, you’ve just been hired to be the new principal at that school. It’s the summer. You’re at a conference. This is your last chance to enjoy yourself before a new school year begins.

You’re at the hotel pool. Suddenly, a handsome man who is quite a bit younger than you jumps into the pool and, after briefly fooling you into thinking that he’s drowned, he starts up a conversation with you. He’s charming in a simple way. He says that you were sexy when you were concerned that he might be dead. He invites you back to his room and you know exactly why.

Do you go with him?

That’s the decision that Kathy (Gina Holden) is faced with at the start of the Lifetime film, Sleeping With My Student. What does she do when she’s given the opportunity to have one night of passion with Ian (Mitchell Hoog)? Well, your answer is right there in the first half of the film’s title. And, as you can probably guess from the second half of title, Ian eventually turns up as a student at Kathy’s school! Even worse, Ian has a reputation for being a bad boy and a trouble maker and soon, he’s dating Kathy’s daughter, Bree (Jessica Belkin)!

Of course, it all turns out to be about more than just one night stands and bad disciplinary histories. It turns out that it wasn’t a coincidence that Ian showed up at the hotel and jumped into the pool at the same moment that Kathy just happened to be there. It also wasn’t a coincidence that Ian just happened to end up getting transferred to Kathy’s new school. It’s all a part of a massive scheme that Ian has cooked up in order to get vengeance for something that happened in the past. I mean, seriously, no one should be surprised. There are no coincidences when it comes to Lifetime.

Speaking as someone who has seen a few hundred Lifetime films over the past few years, I enjoyed Sleeping With My Student. Gina Holde, Mitchell Hoog, and Jessica Belkin were all well-cast in their rules and the great Gerald Webb showed up as Officer Compton, the school security officer who first explains that Ian is bad news. Yes, the plot was a bit predictable but that’s honestly a part of the film’s appeal. You don’t necessarily watch a Lifetime film because you want to see something unexpected. Instead, the appeal of these films is to be found in their very predictability. There’s something comforting in knowing that, on Lifetime, no one night stand will turn out to be just a one night stand and that the film’s villain will always do something particularly evil at the halfway mark. The best Lifetime films are cinematic comfort food. They give you exactly what you want and they don’t demand much in return and we’re all the better for it!

Lifetime Film Review: The Wrong Stepmother (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“I hear that Maddie is one bad mother….”

“Shut your mouth!”

“But I’m talking about Maddie.”

“Then we can dig it!”

Actually, Maddie (Cindy Busby) is not a mother, though she would like to be. She not even a stepmother, despite what the title says. Instead, she’s just dating the recently widowed Michael (Corin Nemec). If she does end up marrying Michael, Maddie will become a stepmother — perhaps even a WRONG stepmother — to his two daughters, Lilly (Calli Taylor) and Nicole (McKinley Blehm).

It doesn’t take Lilly long to realize that there’s something off about Maddie. For one thing, she catches Maddie trying to check her social media. Then she overhears Maddie claiming to be her mother. And finally, Maddie changes up Lilly’s college admission essay. See, Lilly wrote about how much her late mother influenced her. Maddie, however, changes it into an essay about how much Lilly loves her future stepmother.

Yes, Maddie has some issues. As we discover at the start of the film, she has a history of stalking people. About halfway through the film, she murders two people. Whenever you’re watching a film on Lifetime, you know someone’s going to get murdered at exactly halfway through the film. You can set the time by it.

As with all of Lifetime’s “Wrong” films, Vivica A. Fox has a small role. In this one, she plays Ms. Price, the high school guidance counselor who is extremely unimpressed by Lilly’s college admissions essay. When Ms. Price confronts Lilly about how unimpressive her essay was, Fox delivers the lines with such subtle fury and annoyance that it brought back a lot of high school memories for me. As played by Fox, Ms. Price is the type of high school counselor who scares you to death but who also changes your life for the better. If Ms. Price had been my counselor, I definitely wouldn’t have spent so much time skipping class and shoplifting makeup at Target.

Anyway, the main complaint that you always hear about Lifetime films is that they’re all exactly the same but that’s actually their appeal. They’re fun to watch, precisely because 1) they’re predictable and 2) the viewer is always going to be smarter than the people in the movie. I mean, we can take one look at Maddie and say, “Okay, don’t let her in the house.” However, Michael’s not that smart and, if he was, we really wouldn’t have a movie. Sometimes, you just have to stop crying about plausibility and enjoy what you’re watching.

The Wrong Stepmother gets a big boost from the casting of the always likable Corin Nemec as Michael. I mean, it’s pretty much impossible not to root for a character played by Corin Nemec, even if that character is way too trusting of someone who he met on a dating app. Meanwhile, Cindy Busby is properly psychotic as Maddie and, of course, you’ve got Vivica A. Fox changing lives as Ms. Price.

The Wrong Stepmother is an entertaining Lifetime film. Watch it with your snarkiest friends.