I put on Lifetime for last night's "world premiere" — I don't know if Lifetime is going back to airing movies regularly on Mondays or was just doing this as a Labor Day special and then will go back to the sorry "original" shows they put on most of the week (including the "Little Women" exercises in modern high-tech dwarf-tossing) — which was "Stalked by My Doctor: The Return," an unexpected sequel to a previous Lifetime movie, Stalked by My Doctor. I'd enjoyed "Stalked by My Doctor" despite the staleness and sometimes risibility of its plot (the writer and director of both films was Doug Campbell), mainly because of the tour de force performance by actor Eric Roberts in the male lead of the doctor, a super-surgeon from L.A. named Albert Beck, who in the first episode fell head over heels for the underage chiclet Sophie Green (Brianna Joy Chomer) whom he determined to marry, and when she said no to him he kidnapped her, tied her to the four posts of an old-fashioned bed in a classic S/M bondage position, and threatened her with dismemberment until she escaped, showed up at her own "memorial" service, and the cops came to the home where the doctor held her and he's fled. A final tag scene located him in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, though when "Stalked by My Doctor: The Return" opens he's relocated his Mexican abode from Cabo San Lucas to Acapulco, where he starts the movie by buying a drink for an American tourist named Rachel. It seems Rachel came down to Acapulco with a girlfriend, only she hooked up with a guy and left her alone for several days. Using the name "Victor Slauson" — an alias he's established enough that he's been able to obtain a U.S. passport with that name — he shows her smartphone photos of his Mexican mansion and his oceangoing yacht, which he says he's had trouble coming up with a name for until now, when after meeting her he's decided to call the boat "Rachel." Fortunately Rachel is smart enough to see through his B.S., asking if he really thinks he's going to get anywhere with such an obvious and old-fashioned pickup strategy like that, and she walks away from him without even taking the drink he bought for her. (Lucky her.) Then there's a scene showing Victor nè Albert doing what he usually does to get over being rejected — he gets in his car and drives really fast — but the next day he's on the beach and he meets the underage pigeon whom he's going to stalk for the rest of the movie: Amy Watkins (Claire Blackwelder), whom he meets on a beach in Acapulco when she's nearly drowned and he uses his skills to perform CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her and therefore save her life. Of course he's instantly smitten with her, but in a plot twist he no doubt picked up from reading Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita" (at the end of the movie he's actually shown reading the book), he decides that the way to Amy Watkins' heart (or, more precisely, a somewhat lower part of her anatomy) is to marry her widowed mom Linda (Hillary Greer), who's been a psychological basket case since Amy's dad was killed falling off a ladder at their home eight years earlier. She's developed an intense fear of heights and hasn't been on a date with a guy since she lost her husband, and Dr. Slausen (as she knows him) sets his cap for her by having her stand on higher and higher surfaces — first a footrest, then a chair, then a stepstool and finally what looks like the same ladder her husband had his fatal accident on — in what Campbell, who likes to stop his movies dead in their tracks to show us how many classic films he's seen, copies (though with the genders reversed) from the scenes of Barbara Bel Geddes trying to get James Stewart out of his vertigo in "Vertigo." We also get a few abruptly cut in sequences that Campbell tantalizes us with before we realize that they're simply the central character's dreams, though one odd scene that isn't a dream of Dr. Slauson occurs earlier in the show, when he's just arrived in San Diego and he's trying to find Amy. His one clue is a T-shirt with the name "Hamilton" on it, indicating that she goes to Hamilton High School (there is no high school named "Hamilton" in San Diego, but who cares; it's only a movie), so he hangs out there and looks at the students going by until he sees her. Unfortunately, she's with her age-peer boyfriend Garth (Mark Grossman, a nice, appealing piece of young man-meat who shows a good-sized basket, especially in a brief scene in which we get to see him in grey sweat pants), and Garth (correctly) calls the not-so-good doctor a "pervert" and punches him out. Then, after Amy explains that he's the doctor who saved her life in Mexico, Garth apologizes but still doesn't like the not-so-good doc.
For all the weaknesses — the far-fetched and almost risible plotting (though at least this one is a bit more believable than the first), the wretchedly cut-in dream sequences and the borrowings from earlier and better movies that seems like Doug Campbell tapping us on the shoulders and saying, "You see how many movies I've seen?" — Stalked by My Doctor: The Return is actually quite good; Campbell's script, as silly as it gets sometimes, at least exploits director Campbell's talents for Gothic atmosphere and effective suspense editing, and as in the first film he gets an excellent performance out of Eric Roberts. He's neither too milquetoast nor too floridly villainous; instead he's presented as a character who's professionally competent and could easily inspire confidence in others, even while we're not shorted on the unscrupulous, villainous side that dominates his character.
For all the weaknesses — the far-fetched and almost risible plotting (though at least this one is a bit more believable than the first), the wretchedly cut-in dream sequences and the borrowings from earlier and better movies that seems like Doug Campbell tapping us on the shoulders and saying, "You see how many movies I've seen?" — Stalked by My Doctor: The Return is actually quite good; Campbell's script, as silly as it gets sometimes, at least exploits director Campbell's talents for Gothic atmosphere and effective suspense editing, and as in the first film he gets an excellent performance out of Eric Roberts. He's neither too milquetoast nor too floridly villainous; instead he's presented as a character who's professionally competent and could easily inspire confidence in others, even while we're not shorted on the unscrupulous, villainous side that dominates his character.