by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie
was The Murder Pact, an
unusually well done thriller (especially considering the source!) which begins
with a nice-looking but rather, shall we say, heavy-set young woman named Camille (Alexa PenaVega — that
odd spelling of her last name, with the two words jammed together but with a
capital letter in the middle as if she were a computer program, is what both
the official credits and imdb.com gave us) belting out a power-rock ballad as
an audition piece for some bored Broadway producers who are really looking for
an established star to play the lead in their next show and only agreed to see
her as a favor to her 1-percenter boyfriend Will LaSalle (Beau Mirchoff). Will
seems to have it all — money, social position and good looks — and he never
lets anyone forget it; he’s officially engaged to Camille but that doesn’t stop
him from bedding any young woman who’ll hold still for him. What’s more, he’s
got his bedroom bugged so he can photograph his sexual encounters and relive
the experiences any time he wants by playing them on his laptop. The principals
are Camilla, Will, Will’s less secure friend Rick (Michael J. Willett, who
incidentally has his hair dyed blonde on his imdb.com head shot though he’s
dark-haired in this movie) and Annabel (Renée Olstead), a hanger-on and (of
course) occasional trick of Will’s who’s also an aspiring dancer and is
super-concerned about her weight.
All of them are students at Camden College, a
New England university whose most prominent architectural feature is a
spectacularly ugly round building that looks like Frank Gehry re-imagined the
Capitol Tower. Will has living parents but they almost never see him — a
picture of his dad hangs over his mantel as if it’s keeping an eye on him, but
we never see his mom at all and his dad (John Heard) only makes a brief
surprise appearance towards the end to warn Will that he can do everything he
likes as long as he doesn’t besmirch the LaSalle family name. If he does, dad
solemnly warns Will, he’ll be disinherited at once. That happens in the middle
of an event that has completely discombobulated Will’s carefully constructed
life: Heidi (Madeleine Dauer), yet another young co-ed Will has got drunk,
drugged and put the make on, takes a tumble off the railing on one of the
Camden dorm balconies and falls to her death. It appears to be an accident — director
Colin Theys, working from a script by John Doolan, makes it look even to us as if that particular section of the railing was
just loose and gave way under Heidi’s weight — but while the altercation on the
balcony was going on a student photographer named Lisa (Sara Kapner) happened
by and took photos of the whole thing. Lisa contacts Will and his friends and
threatens to blackmail them, demanding $4 million for the photos or she’ll take
them to the police and Will will get popped for Heidi’s murder. The four
principals meet to discuss how they’re going to handle the situation and
collectively decide that as members of the financial and social elite they have
way too much to live for to
let a nobody from “the other side of the tracks” as Lisa get in the way and
threaten their futures. So, at Will’s instigation, they decide they’re simply
going to kill her.
Will insists that Camille, as the queasiest and most
conscience-stricken of the four, commit the actual murder, and so Camille wraps
an industrial plastic bag over Lisa’s head and knocks her off. Then Will buries
her under the floorboards of his family home’s basement — in a plot twist
writer Doolan admitted in the credits he borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Tell-Tale Heart” (he bills it as an “adaptation” of the Poe story, which it
really isn’t, though his script invokes several Poe tales, including “The Cask
of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial”) — he says he saw Lisa’s eyes twitch
as they were sealing the floorboards back over her, and Camille assures her she
did the job right and Lisa is dead. Only the conspirators keep reporting
sightings of items of Lisa’s they buried with her but seem to be coming back to
life, as if she were still alive and haunting them — and their consciences
affect Rick and Annabel to the point where Rick starts doing drugs and gets
himself kicked off the school’s rowing team, and Annabel gets lost during a
ballet rehearsal in which she and the corps are supposed to be doing a routine to Richard
Rodgers’ “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Just when those about him are freaking
out — and Rick has become the apparent third victim, falling off his rowboat in
a drug-induced stupor and ending up comatose after one of his teammates
inadvertently hit him under water with his oar — Will’s dad flies back from
Europe (and almost immediately leaves again, as if even he can’t stand being around this self-indulgent,
arrogant psycho creep he has somehow fathered) and gives him the warning about
being allowed to do anything he wants (was his dad really including murder in that?) as long as he doesn’t
besmirch the family name. The film builds to a trick ending [big-time
spoiler alert!] in which it turns out
Camille and Lisa plotted the whole thing; Camille merely faked killing Lisa and let her out again after Will left
the basement, and Lisa set up all the mysterious “appearances” of her stuff —
including her camera, whose materialization in Rick’s bedroom was what drove
him to his overdose. They did it not only to split the $4 million in blackmail
money they finally got Will to pay (Will starts to key in the password to his
cell phone to transfer the money to the account Lisa had set up to receive it,
then drops his phone and Camille picks it up and completes the transaction) but
also to teach Will a lesson in humility and show him he can’t just go through
his life treating other people like garbage without facing the consequences.
Writer Doolan even did something I was suspecting he would when Camille’s
opening audition scene resulted in her not getting the part because no one had
ever heard of her: he ripped off Chicago for a tag scene in which the producer and director (the same ones) call
another audition and recognize her instantly as the woman whose photo was shown
everywhere in connection with Will’s arrest (though it’s not clear just what
Will got arrested for — since
Lisa didn’t die and the other two deaths in the story were genuinely
accidental, the most he could get popped for was attempted murder). Doolan even created an eccentric character,
Detective Dakoulas (Sean Patrick Thomas), an African-American who seems through
most of the movie to be doing the Columbo schtick and trying to annoy Will
and his (presumed) co-conspirators into confessing, but in the end he turns out
to be someone Camille and Lisa recruited from a Camden College acting class
(though he’s so much older than the other protagonists it would be more
believable if we were told he was an acting teacher) to pose as a cop for their scheme. The Murder
Pact is actually well done, a
genuinely suspenseful thriller with a legitimate surprise ending, and though
some of it seems a bit arbitrary — the climax takes place at a masquerade ball
Will is throwing (a family tradition he insists on carrying on even though his
folks, who usually host it, are out of town) that seems more to reflect a
desire on the part of writer Doolan and director Theys to do a knockoff of Eyes
Wide Shut (also a story of decadence
among the 1 percent!) than anything else — and the moral about spoiled rich
kids thinking they can do literally anything they like because their (or their parents’) money
will always be there to buy them out of it is done well here but was done even
better in the previous Lifetime movie Restless Virgins — for the most part this is an amazing film, and
it’s especially nice to watch a Lifetime movie in which the two male
protagonists are definitely exciting, hot young men (Beau Mirchoff as Will even
has something of a James Dean quality, though Dean never played a character who
was born to this much money), even though inevitably, given Lifetime’s
well-established iconography, hot young man = black-hearted villain!
