Lifetime showed two "premiere" movies March 18, of which the first was "Mommy's Little Boy," a clear follow-up to the 2016 production they had re-run just before it, "Mommy's Little Girl." Created by the same people — Lifetime's ace writer, Christine Conradt (she had help from Mark Sanderson on the script for "Mommy's Little Girl" but wrote "Mommy's Little Boy" solo), and her frequent directorial collaborator, Curtis James Crawford, "Mommy's Little Boy" wasn't a ripoff of "The Bad Seed" the way "Mommy's Little Girl" was. It was promoted on the Lifetime Web site by a 29-second trailer that showed Mommy's little boy, Eric Wilson (Peter DaCunha), out with her in the dead of night helping her bury a tarp-wrapped body, which made it looked like mommy Briana Wilson (Bree Williamson) was knocking people off and enlisting sonny-boy's help as an accessory after the fact. The truth, when we finally get to see the movie start to finish, is more complex and more morally ambiguous than that — moral ambiguity is the biggest thing that separates Conradt's scripts from those by the rest of Lifetime's writers. When we first meet Eric he's being all too blatantly bullied by his older half-brother Max (Auden Larratt).
Briana spends most of her time drinking — sometimes at sleazy bars, in one of which she meets a boyfriend de jour named Shane Reed (Sebastian Pigott) who figures prominently in the later action, but mostly at home, straight from a bottle of liquor which, since the fluid is clear, we assume is either vodka or gin. During one afternoon she's lying next to their backyard swimming pool, laying in a chaise longue, listening to music via ear buds and doing the best she can to drown out the sounds of her sons as they horseplay in the pool. Somehow Max falls to the bottom of the pool, a wound opens up and he dies — director Crawford keeps it uncertain whether Eric deliberately killed him, whether he was fighting back against Max's bullying and just pushed too hard, or Max had an accident and Eric's only culpability was that he didn't bother to tell mom until it was too late because he knew he would be better off with his brother dead than alive. Nonetheless, mom convinces Eric that he's a murderer and he's going to have to do exactly what she says or else he's going to end up in prison. The Wilsons have a nosy neighbor who lives across the street, Barbara Nolan (Brigitte Robinson), who notices that the Wilson boys aren't eating especially well, so she brings over dinner and mom overreacts hysterically to the idea that she needs some interloper to help her feed her kids. So she clongs Barbara on the head with a frying pan, knocking her unconscious and leaving Eric alone with the body.
Eric notices that Barbara is still alive and is about to reach for the phone to call 911 when mom comes back into the room. Eric tells her, "She's not dead," and mom's response is to keep hitting Barbara over the head with the pan until she really is most sincerely dead. Then mom concocts the plot for concealing her crime into which she enlists Eric and which involves the scene we saw in the trailer: mom buries Barbara's body in the local Kern Campgrounds (the film supposedly takes place in Philadelphia but the settings look more suburban to me) and abandons Barbara's car and purse, hoping that either or both will get stolen, the police will find them and, if Barbara's body is ever discovered, the cops will blame her murder on whoever stole her car and/or purse. Only it doesn't work that way because nobody goes near the car, and when she isn't doing bouncy-bouncy with Shane or getting plastered, she's noting the news reports as the cops find first the car and then Barbara herself. Meanwhile, Eric has managed to escape from mom's bizarre clutches into one of the local parks, where he runs into a girl his age named Kaylee Davis (Jadyn Malone) and her parents, local schoolteacher and coach Michael Davis (Paul Popowich, one of those rare males in a Lifetime movie who's both hot and sexy and actually gets to play a good guy!) and his wife Sherry (Natalie Lisinska). We immediately get the impression that the Davises would make far better parents for Eric than his mother would, not only because there are two of them but because they're strong, loving, supportive and have better things to do with their lives than drink themselves into oblivion.
As melodramatic as it sometimes is, and as clear that Conradt has been doing these for so long (her first Lifetime script, "The Perfect Nanny," was made in 2000) she's got the clichés down pat and knows what her audiences expect, she also manages to make her characters believable as flesh-and-blood people with flaws as well as good points. We basically like and root for Eric but he does leave his brother in the pool to die, and later he shoots someone whose only crime was wanting to discipline him; and Briana comes off as a figure of real pathos even though we generally loathe her; we basically like the nosy neighbor Briana offs early on but could see how her constant butting in to the Wilsons' lives could become a real trial; and Shane comes off as a no-account pleasure-seeker but also a proud and independent man who's just in over his head with this woman and her troubled son. The Davis family are the only members of the dramatis personae of Mommy's Little Boy who really are too good to be true; otherwise the characterizations are intriguing and make this something more than just your standard-issue Lifetime movie with a provocative title and premise.
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