I watched a Lifetime movie that was having its so-called "world premiere" last night: "A Sister's Revenge," a pretty standard-issue bad-girl thriller for the Lifetime channel that shows how much Christine Conradt has set the format for these things and essentially become Lifetime's auteur, to the point where a film that she had nothing to do with (this one had someone named John Serge as the writer and Curtis James Crawford —though IMDb.com leaves out his middle name — as the director) nonetheless hits all the major points of her formula. It begins with a woman in a light SUV running down another woman riding a bicycle; we don't know who either of these two people are yet but the woman in the SUV runs down the woman on the bike and she ends up
well, we presume she's badly injured and is going to be laid up for quite a while. Then the scene cuts to a restaurant called Michael's Bar and Grill, which despite the unassuming exterior and the proletarian name is really a pretty upscale place once Crawford's camera dollies us inside. The proprietor is Michael Miller (Tim Rozon, not exactly drop-dead gorgeous but a good deal handsomer than a lot of Lifetime leading men), who's happily married to a woman named Catherine (Ashley Jones), though she's getting restive because their son Evan was just born and Michael has insisted that Catherine take the first year of Evan's life off work and mother him. Unfortunately, Michael needs to hire a new hostess because his previous one was in an unexpected accident and is going to be laid up for a while (and if you're a veteran Lifetime movie-watcher you don't need two guesses to figure out how that happened), and after turning down the first applicant (she tells him, "I can bench 250 pounds," which makes me think she'd have been a good candidate for the job: with that amount of strength, she could be both a hostess and a bouncer) he hires Suzanne Dunne (Brooke Burns), a blonde who walked in on the job without bothering to turn in an application first but because she's flirting with him (just because he's married doesn't mean he can't look!) and his gonads are in play he hires her anyway.
At first I thought this was going to be another one of Lifetime's "Perfect" movies, in which the unscrupulous bad girl goes after the good guy's money and/or his bod and doesn't let the fact that he's already married to the good girl stand in her way one bit. Then we get a scene of Suzanne at home with her boyfriend Jimmy (Joe Marques) and it appears that they're in some kind of plot to scam money out of Michael. Suzanne does everything she can to sabotage both Michael's restaurant and his life, and it's not until about two-thirds of the way through the movie that we finally learn what this is all about: before moving to Philadelphia (where the film takes place), marrying Catherine and building the restaurant, Michael lived in San Francisco and had a relationship with Suzanne's sister Ariel (Allison Busner). We've only seen Ariel on computer videos Suzanne obsessively watches when she's alone at home, and we weren't sure who she was — and for that matter we weren't sure whether these were old tapes or they were Skyping each other in real time (one nice thing about this movie — which hasn't always been true of Lifetime — is at least the communications technology is up to date; there've been Lifetime films set in high school in the mid-2000's which asked us to believe that none of the students had a laptop, a smartphone or a Facebook account). Now we find out through some exposition from Suzanne and a few flashbacks (in which Tim Rozon actually does look credibly younger than he does in the main part of the movie) that Ariel took the relationship a lot more seriously than Michael did. When Ariel got pregnant she expected Michael to marry her; instead he rejected her and went to Philadelphia after leaving her the money for an abortion, and instead of having either the baby or the abortion she committed suicide. That is what Suzanne has been bent on having her titular "sister's revenge" on, and in the film's most chilling scene Michael pleads with her and asks what he can do, to which she replies, "Suffer." "A Sister's Revenge" is one of those obsessive Lifetime movies that isn't terribly good as a movie but is redeemed by a marvelous villainess performance from Brooke Burns, who makes her twisted psyche believable and even a bit understandable (her background is that both she and Ariel were molested as children by their father, and when she saw her dad raping Ariel she killed him and got three years in a mental institution for her pains), but she can't undo the effects of slovenly writing and by-the-numbers direction that portrays Michael's Kafkaesque fate in all too matter-of-fact a manner.
At first I thought this was going to be another one of Lifetime's "Perfect" movies, in which the unscrupulous bad girl goes after the good guy's money and/or his bod and doesn't let the fact that he's already married to the good girl stand in her way one bit. Then we get a scene of Suzanne at home with her boyfriend Jimmy (Joe Marques) and it appears that they're in some kind of plot to scam money out of Michael. Suzanne does everything she can to sabotage both Michael's restaurant and his life, and it's not until about two-thirds of the way through the movie that we finally learn what this is all about: before moving to Philadelphia (where the film takes place), marrying Catherine and building the restaurant, Michael lived in San Francisco and had a relationship with Suzanne's sister Ariel (Allison Busner). We've only seen Ariel on computer videos Suzanne obsessively watches when she's alone at home, and we weren't sure who she was — and for that matter we weren't sure whether these were old tapes or they were Skyping each other in real time (one nice thing about this movie — which hasn't always been true of Lifetime — is at least the communications technology is up to date; there've been Lifetime films set in high school in the mid-2000's which asked us to believe that none of the students had a laptop, a smartphone or a Facebook account). Now we find out through some exposition from Suzanne and a few flashbacks (in which Tim Rozon actually does look credibly younger than he does in the main part of the movie) that Ariel took the relationship a lot more seriously than Michael did. When Ariel got pregnant she expected Michael to marry her; instead he rejected her and went to Philadelphia after leaving her the money for an abortion, and instead of having either the baby or the abortion she committed suicide. That is what Suzanne has been bent on having her titular "sister's revenge" on, and in the film's most chilling scene Michael pleads with her and asks what he can do, to which she replies, "Suffer." "A Sister's Revenge" is one of those obsessive Lifetime movies that isn't terribly good as a movie but is redeemed by a marvelous villainess performance from Brooke Burns, who makes her twisted psyche believable and even a bit understandable (her background is that both she and Ariel were molested as children by their father, and when she saw her dad raping Ariel she killed him and got three years in a mental institution for her pains), but she can't undo the effects of slovenly writing and by-the-numbers direction that portrays Michael's Kafkaesque fate in all too matter-of-fact a manner.