by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent this morning
watching a better-than-average film from Lifetime, Home Invasion, another auteur production from Christine Conradt. Lifetime’s ace
screenwriter (who is probably more responsible than any other single person for
creating the style of the “Lifetime movie”) had to share writing credits with
three other people, Ken Sanders and Michael Shipman for the story (though if
they came up with this without Conradt’s help they can at least be credited for
having vividly internalized her style of plot construction!) and Conradt
herself co-credited with the screenplay along with the film’s director, Doug
Campbell, though Conradt also gets an “executive producer” credit which seems
to suggest she’s moving up in the movie world. One would think that a Christine
Conradt-scripted Lifetime movie called Home Invasion would be about a woman whose home was invaded by a
band of burglars who held her hostage for the full two hours’ running time
until she finally figured out a way to get free of them and/or call the
authorities — but she and Campbell had some surprises up their sleeves this
time. It begins with a hot soft-core porn scene between Jade (Haylie Duff) and
her boyfriend Will (Taymour Ghazi) that’s interrupted by another man, Ray (C.
Thomas Howell), who wants them to knock off their amorous activities and get to
work. The “work” he has in mind is a home-invasion robbery, though apparently
what he wants is to enter an empty house and then wait for the occupants to come home so he can hold them
at gunpoint and force them to cash out all their bank accounts in addition to
stealing whatever valuables they have on the premises. These scenes are
intercut with the people who are going to become the victims: Nicole (Lisa
Sheridan), her boyfriend Eric (Jason Brooks) and her adoptive daughter Abigail
(Kyla Dang), whom we can tell is adopted (she’s actually in the process of adopting her) because
she’s visibly Asian and her on-screen mom is white.
It turns out later that
Eric, an architect, is a recovering alcoholic — Nicole broke up with him when
he was still drinking and decided that if she wanted a family, she was going to
have to have one without his help, so she made the arrangements to adopt
Abigail as a single mom, and then Eric got into A.A. (we know that because he
makes a passing reference to a “meeting” he’s going to, and since none of these
people are political activists it’s obvious what sort of meeting he means) and
he’s been sober for 17 months so far, just long enough for Nicole to start to
think that maybe he’s worth marrying and having kids with au naturel after all. Where this film starts to go in
directions veteran Conradt-scripted movie writers don’t expect is when Nicole,
being told to empty her safe at gunpoint, finds in it not only her jewels but
also a gun of her own, which she carefully removes and uses to shoot Will in
the back. The police, led by Detective Klein (Al Sapienza), buy her claim of
justifiable homicide, and Maurice Lapeer (Jason Stuart), the rather queeny chef
she’s hired for the restaurant she’s about to open (called the “Moon Bridge
Café” even though, whatever the cuisine is, it’s decidedly not Asian) — when he admits his assistant isn’t very
talented one half-expects him to add, “But I love it when he stuffs his big thick cock up my ass, so
I don’t care” — suggests she join a support group for robbery victims. The only
problem with that is that Jade, who’s now calling herself Megan, joins the
support group herself and says she’s there to get over her grief from her
husband having been murdered — only in one slip she calls him her “boyfriend”
and when Nicole notices and says, “I thought he was your husband,” Megan tosses
it off and says, “We were engaged.” Of course she’s up to no good, and in the
manner of the usual Christine Conradt villainess she proceeds to ingratiate
herself with Nicole, offering to come over to their house and give Abigail
swimming lessons — it was established in the early scenes at the beach that
Abigail is afraid of water — and she encourages Abigail to “surprise” her
mother by going swimming in the family pool alone.
It’s a surprise, all right,
as Abigail nearly drowns while Nicole and Eric are in the house having an
argument, and they hear her just in time for Eric to dive in the pool (fully
clothed) and save her, but Abigail tells a couple of her classmates about the
incident, Megan somehow learns about it, and calls in a complaint to social
worker Tricia (Barbara Niven) that Abigail is being neglected. Meanwhile, Megan
also joins Nicole for lunch at the Moon Bridge Café and somehow manages to
spike some of the food so nine people, including Nicole herself, come down with
food poisoning from whatever it was they ate there — leading the health
authorities to close the place down (there’s a grimly ironic little scene in
which Nicole visits a doctor and the doctor tells her not to eat at the Moon
Bridge Café, not knowing that Nicole owns the place) — and Megan doesn’t stop
there: she torches the restaurant and frames Nicole for arson. Then, exhibiting
the virtually supernatural smarts of a typical Christine Conradt villain of either gender, she decides to target Eric, apparently
figuring, “She killed my boyfriend — I’ll kill hers.” When Nicole and Eric
learn the address of the murdered man, Megan knows they’re on to her late
boyfriend and goes out to Eric’s home to ambush him. Meanwhile, while Megan is
stalking Nicole and Eric, the third member of the robbery gang, Ray, is
stalking her because he wants to get
back at her for having clubbed him with a rock in the woods and escaped on her
own — and when Ray shows up at Eric’s place Megan knifes him to death and sets
it up to look like Eric was the killer.
While all that’s been going on,
Detective Klein, sure that Nicole was guilty of burning down her own restaurant
for the insurance money, comes along just when she’s supposed to meet Tricia
the social worker and try to convince her to let her keep Abigail — and of
course the presence of police interrogating Nicole about a serious crime
they’re convinced she’s guilty of has the opposite effect and Tricia takes
Abigail away for yet another date with the foster-care system Nicole had freed
her from. It all ends back at Nicole’s house, where Megan (who can enter at
will since she’s stolen Nicole’s keys and had them copied) confronts Nicole,
intending to kill her with an injection of potassium chloride, only the wounded
Eric recovers and wires the room with a video camera so anything that happens
in it will be recorded. Nicole finally kills Megan after getting the evidence
on tape that Megan is guilty, and she’s exonerated and the last scene is the
three of them (Nicole, Eric and Abigail) reunited on the beach they were at in
the opening sequences, Abigail proclaiming that she’s no longer afraid of the
water, and Nicole telling her that just as she’s learned a new last name she’s
going to have to take another one because Nicole and Eric are going to get married.
Home Invasion has some of the usual
flaws of a Christine Conradt production — a script full of holes and some
pretty outrageously melodramatic plotting — but it also has some of the good things about a Conradt production: Campbell is an
effective suspense director and the two of them keep us interested and keep us
watching, and the ending for once is reasonably credible and doesn’t rely on
the seeming intervention of half the U.S. military to save our damsel in
distress. Home Invasion is also
well acted, especially by Haylie Duff as the villainess; that weird little pout
that forms on her face at her nastiest moments tells us a lot more about her
evil than a more overtly snarling performance would.
