LMN
LMN’s ‘Wicked Revenge’ theme continues with a movie that actually is about revenge, but hoo boy, is there a lot to unpack with this one. If nothing else, Let’s Murder Like It’s 1999! is the greatest title of any LMN movie in quite some time.
The basic plot of the movie is centered around a 25 year high school reunion … except it’s the 27th year because they missed the last two for some reason in a throwaway explanation. We’ll just have to guess the filmmakers were focused on the ‘1999’ of the title which doesn’t work for 2026 because no one has a 27th high school reunion. I’d have to argue they should have set the movie 10 years earlier so they could have used 1989, which would have made more sense by putting it in the era — the end of the era — of the 80s slasher movies. So the story begins as one of the classmates returns to the Florida town for the reunion, now a well known social media influencer, and she is promptly dispatched in her hotel room, with a piece of paper in her hand torn from the diary of another classmate who died after she went to college. There is another attempted murder, but solving the case falls on the assistant medical examiner and her journalist boyfriend because the one cop in town doesn’t seem to have a clue. And it all comes down to a doozy of a conclusion — with a pretty easily identifiable killer … but there is a twist. And oh so many questions.
LMN
This movie has an unusually large cast for an LMN movie, which generally tries to keep things economical with a minimum of actors in a small scale story. So we have the assistant medical examiner, Dr. Laney Bishop (April Martucci); her daughter Cara (Josie Juliette Wert), who I thought was her sister at first; journalist Gage Crawford (Christopher Frederick Thomas); Laney’s high school friend Rob (Mitchell McCollum); his newest — and much younger — girlfriend Izzy (Courtney Elvira); Cara’s boyfriend Wesley Beckett (Evan Hufferd); his teacher father Mr. Beckett (John Hardy), who gets no first name; inept Sheriff Burke (Britt George); reunion organizer Angie Holmes (Hillary Moss), and victim Kelly Hunt (Camila Banus). I guess we should also mention Concierge Lyle (Oliver Bartolomeo), who isn’t a concierge, but is a desk clerk at a swanky hotel who for some reason also acts as a bellhop, escorting Kelly and her bag to her executive suite with its own pool that, for some reason, is automatically covered at sundown … but since she’s Kelly Hunt and Lyle is all agog over her, his first ‘follow’ ever, he gives her the remote to the cover, which is inexplicably at the front desk, so she can go for a night swim. That is a lot of people to keep track of.
So … when Kelly is found dead in her room, Sheriff Burke immediately believes she fell and hit her head on a table, and Laney (who is only there because the chief medical examiner is on a plot-dictated vacation or something contrived so she can be tied to the case) points out to him that a blunt force trauma like Kelly’s would not cause the amount of blood spatter there is across the carpet so that can only mean she was murdered. No one stops to consider that she could have crawled across the rug after falling, perhaps trying to get to a phone. But Laney’s belief is only bolstered by the piece of paper found clutched in Kelly’s fist that Laney immediately recognizes as being from her dead best friend’s diary. Laney, who is wearing gloves, hands the slip of paper to the sheriff … who is NOT wearing gloves, immediately tainting the evidence. But why would anyone want to kill Kelly, and how is it linked to the long dead Molly? At home, Laney is hiding boyfriend Gage from daughter Cara, and we keep seeing Laney looking at a photo of a man and a small child, so when a woman who looks like Laney’s sister walks into the kitchen after Laney snuck Gage out, it came as quite a surprise that she was 18-year-old Cara, who is helping put together her mother’s high school reunion and about to do the deed for the first time with boyfriend Wesley, whose father is also one of his teachers and a member of the Class of ’99 who all the girls had a thing for back in the day. The murder of Kelly brings up the death of Molly (and you can’t help but laugh at the theatre poster in Cara’s room for the show ‘Hello Molly’) for Laney and bestie Rob as the three of them were tight, but just friends (until Rob later admits he had a major crush on Molly, and Laney admits to him that they knew, and he’s been beating himself up about not having the courage to tell her even though he took a bus to her college and never knocked on the door, so perhaps she’d still be alive if he had). Rob’s new, young, girlfriend Izzy seems cool, Laney likes her better than the last one, and she really connects with Cara, probably because they are closer in age than she is to Rob or Laney.
LMN
Things get more complicated when Cara goes to Wesley’s house to ‘study’, and his dad peeks in on them making out on the bed because Wes left the door cracked open so they didn’t make out, so Mr. Beckett goes to his secret room behind the bookshelf and picks out a videotape from a selection with various girls’ names on them and we realize he’s into some Jeffrey Epstein shizz (and we don’t need the visual image in our mind of what he was going to do while watching the video … but we have it), but thankfully the same Black Hoodie Killer who took out Kelly just walks into the house through the front door — there are no working locks in this movie including Kelly’s hotel room — and finds Beckett’s secret room, whacking him in the head with a book and then attempting to strangle him with some VHS tape, leaving an envelope on his chest. For absolutely no reason, Laney shows up and lets herself in (at least the door was ajar this time) and also finds the secret room and then picks up the envelope and removes the contents, a VHS tape labeled ‘Molly’, WITHOUT gloves … and also fails to check Beckett for a pulse. Because, surprise, he’s still alive! And there was another piece of Molly’s diary at the scene. So how are he, Molly and Kelly connected? And why were Cara and Wes taken to the ambulance if they weren’t injured? It would help to have Molly’s complete diary, but Laney and Gage have the next best thing — Beckett, who is now handcuffed to a hospital bed under guard. But they go to the hospital to confront Beckett, and Gage somehow knows exactly when the guard will go on his coffee break, leaving the hallway completely unattended. That’s when Beckett reveals the truth to them: while Beckett was cosplaying as Epstein, Kelly was his Ghislaine Maxwell, trafficking the girls to him — and he swears they were all 18. Well, that took an ugly turn. So could Molly’s father be the culprit? He moved out of town right after she died, so did he know about the sexcapades of Beckett and Kelly and is getting (wicked) revenge for Molly’s death? But if she died at college, how would any of that be related? Suicide from the shame and guilt of what she went through at the hands of Kelly and Beckett? After Laney views some of the ‘Molly’ tape — not more than 30 seconds or so — she and Gage decide to look up Molly’s father, which was not difficult to do since they knew where he moved to, but somehow the sheriff couldn’t seem to find him.
LMN
So they get to the house — surprise, the front door IS locked … but the back door is not — and when the two go inside, Laney finds the black-and-white corpse of Molly’s father. Laney also discovers there is a room in the house that is decorated exactly like Molly’s room in their old house but there is a clean rectangular spot on the dirty desk where the diary should have been, so the dad was obviously murdered and the diary stolen by whoever has killed Kelly and attempted to kill Beckett. A neighbor reveals to Gage and Laney that she had seen a car sitting outside the house for quite some time and she took down the license plate number … but she’s not giving it to them. So Laney pretends she needs to use the bathroom before their ‘long drive’ back home and she goes to the woman’s sewing room, opens a couple of drawers, and finds a Post-It note with the numbers which she snaps a picture of with her phone. She gives the numbers to Gage and he takes them to the sheriff to run, but the sheriff has had enough of Gage bossing him around and refuses at first, but finally does it.
There will be spoilers from this point so if you have not watched the movie yet, you have been warned.
The license plate is for a car registered to … Rob! But why would he want to kill Kelly and Beckett if he doesn’t know about their involvement with Molly … or does he? Laney, who has resisted attending her high school reunion, finally decides to go and she gets gussied up in her best ‘Mother of the Bride’ dress which Rob and Izzy tell her is spectacular. Even crazier, Izzy tells Cara that she is slaying in her dress, which looks like something Eunice would have worn on Mama’s Family. All this comes after Laney discovers Molly’s diary in her bedroom … dripping blood! Where did the blood come from, why is it dripping, did it not leave a trail through the house? Of course we don’t have to ask how it even got in the house because, again, there are no working locks. But they all get to the reunion and it’s a big bust. The organizer, Hillary, seems to be drowning her sorrows in some booze (she also seems to be in a spoof of this movie as she has been comically over-the-top from her first scene), but the others try to enjoy themselves. Earlier, Izzy had shown up unexpectedly at Cara’s school to give her a ride anywhere she wanted to go, and Cara chose … I’m not really sure what the place was. An art installation? Everything was lit by blacklights, there were a handful of people and some ADR that made it sound like a huge crowd, and Cara spotted Wesley peeking around one of the many, many doorways in the place, one labeled ‘Dramatic Exit’ (there was one object in the middle of the floor that may have suggested this was an indoor mini-golf place but it also felt like some weird art installation … whatever it was, it was Cara’s comfort zone and made her feel like a child again). Wesley told her he wasn’t good for her, he’s damaged goods because everyone knows about his father’s activities and are ostracizing him at school, so it’s best that she has nothing to do with him. So at the reunion, Cara gets a call from Wesley that he’s freaking out and to meet him on the football field. She dashes out without letting anyone know, and in the middle of Laney’s dance with Rob, the lights go out and everyone panics, exiting the building. But Laney can’t find Cara and insists on going back in despite Hillary warning her that the doors are all locked — the ONE building in town with locked doors, which should be unlocked since there is an event happening — and no one will be able to get in to help her. But she goes in anyway and is chloroformed.
LMN
Gage and the sheriff arrive, and instead of running straight to Hillary from the police car — there is a clear path to her of just a yard or so — Gage makes an end run around the people milling about, pushing some aside to get through, and a tipsy Hillary tells him all the doors are locked … except a maintenance door that leads to a teacher’s lounge. WHAT?!? Why is the one door that should be locked unlocked, and why does it lead to a lounge? And where exactly is this door because when Gage finally makes his way to the gym, he has to climb down a ladder! But before that, Laney comes to and is calling out for Cara. Suddenly the projector activates and shows some kind of greatest hits video of the killer’s actions from the killer’s POV. And then the culprit is revealed. Now if you were paying attention during Beckett’s attack, the killer had to knock Laney out of the way to escape and the one quick shot made the killer easily identifiable as a female. And long before this point, this viewer had already come to the conclusion that it was … Izzy. Why? Because she’s half Rob’s age and she comes from the school of acting that says you must telegraph that you are indeed the killer. It had become known after some digging that Molly did not die in her dorm room, but at the hospital … during childbirth, and the baby was assumed dead as well. And Molly’s family shunned her for bringing the embarrassment of her condition onto the family (so then why would her father re-create her childhood bedroom?) but Izzy showed up, got ahold of the diary and took her ‘wicked revenge’ on Kelly and Beckett, who we now assume was the man who got Molly pregnant. And that means Izzy also has a brother, Wesley, who is now in the room to team up with her as the town’s new supervillains. A spotlight reveals Cara is also tied to a chair across from the bound Laney (apparently party streamers are good material to tie up people). It seems Izzy is angry at Laney for not doing more to help Molly, so to get her back she is going to have Laney make a choice of who dies: Cara or her bestie Rob. But Wes gets a little antsy and stabs Rob in the side, but Gage makes it down the ladder just in time to save Laney and Cara. Gage tackles Wes and Izzy tries to run to them but trips over something — perhaps Laney’s foot — and Laney has freed herself and gets into it with Izzy, who gets the upper hand until … Laney grabs a tennis ball-sized disco ball decoration from Dollar Tree and knocks Izzy out with it! So Wes and Izzy are out cold, Laney and Cara console Rob and Gage runs to open the doors so the EMTs and the sheriff can get in. The scene fades to Laney and Cara sitting on the back of an ambulance, and are told Izzy and Wes are fine but don’t hold out hope for Rob. Gage hands Laney an essay Molly had written in college that clearly showed how much she loved Laney, so Izzy’s anger toward her now seems a little misplaced. But graduation day comes, Laney and Gage are now en-Gage-d (tee hee) and … Rob survived. Cheers!
Let’s Murder Like It’s 1999! is completely bonkers, falling into the so-bad-it’s-good category. It may not make a lick of sense, but one thing it is not is boring. But you might ask yourself, as I did, has writer Leo McGuigan ever written a movie before (or even seen one)? According to the IMDb page for McGuigan, the answer to that question is no, with nary a single writing credit to be found (though there are acting, producing and editing credits) so that may explain the lack of anything making sense. No doors are ever locked except the ones that should be unlocked. Crime scene and law enforcement officials touch everything without gloves. Everyone knows about a secret room. A desk clerk is also a bellboy. You’re not allowed to swim in your private pool after sundown. Diaries bleed. Mini disco balls are weapons. No one has a clue about fashion. And if Molly was such an embarrassment, why re-create her room and how on earth did Laney know it was perfectly re-created down to the last detail? Did Molly’s father take pictures of the original room to get it just right?!? How on earth did this script get approved and how many drafts of it were there? Was this the one and only screenplay? Are there others that are even more incomprehensible? Director Brittany Underwood (While They Were Sleeping, Murder at the Derby) somehow manages to keep a handle on things so that even when you know the story is not making any sense, things quickly move on so you can’t dwell on the incomprehensible. The production value is actually quite high and there is a rather large cast and extras that manage to at least elevate the film’s aesthetic, but you still have to wonder if anyone actually read the script ahead of time, and if they did why didn’t anyone ask questions???
LMN
The cast manages to do their best with what they’ve been given, with Josie Juliette Wert probably coming out of this with the best performance, making Cara just feel totally natural, especially in her make-out scene with Wesley, questioning if they should move forward or put a pause on it. She also seems to have a good relationship with her mother, but there is one scene where she flips out on Laney after she had just showed up at the Becketts’ house, breaking any trust the two had. Christopher Frederick Thomas is also fine as Gage, immensely patient as Laney refuses to reveal their relationship to anyone, but always taking the situation completely seriously in trying to solve the mystery. Angie Holmes brings some comic relief to the role of Hillary, but it still feels like she’s in a spoof like Scary Movie. Everyone else has varying degrees of success. April Martucci has the hardest time with the character of Laney because she’s written all over the place. She’s rarely professional in the way she handles evidence, but she has a warm relationship with Cara, and she clearly cares about Rob — not in a romantic way — and she likes Izzy. She works to keep Laney on an even keel but the writing just makes her feel a bit more incompetent than she should.
Britt George plays Sheriff Burke in the typical TV movie way, consumed by the power of the badge, thinking he’s always right because he’s the law, unwilling to listen to anyone unless his hand is forced. Mitchell McCollum delivers all of his lines, when asking Laney about the murder and attempted murder, like he is the suspect digging for information to see how much the law knows and how much more he can get away with. He even seems to know things (as does Hillary) that haven’t been made public yet (you know how gossip spreads in a small town) and it takes a long time before Laney finally catches on that he may be involved. Courtney Elvira does manage to make Izzy seem grounded and she really likes Laney and Cara. But when Rob starts getting too obvious there are times when she steps in too suspiciously, giving away herself (to the viewers) as the killer. Evan Hufferd is also okay as Wesley, seeming to be a normal high school senior, embarrassed that his dad is one of his teachers, but otherwise okay. And then he has his freak out moment that shows he really isn’t okay mentally. But we’re left with the question of why he suddenly turns. Is it because he knew about the secret room and he’s been carrying that burden for too long, or is it because Izzy groomed him by showing him Molly’s diary and perhaps the videotape so that she could control him at the end and they could be a new family? We’ll never know because there was no follow-up, just from the reunion to Cara’s graduation party.
Let’s Murder Like It’s 1999! has a terrific title, a mostly decent cast, high production value, adequately directed scenes … but one of the craziest, some may say inept, screenplays full of ridiculous plot devices that somehow still manages to be entertaining. Like I’ve said before, many of these LMN movies are already bordering on parody and at some point the network really needs to just lean into that and give us a truly comedic thriller. As this one is presented as straight-forward, we end up laughing at it instead of with it, and that’s not what the people involved are hoping for. But despite all of that, it’s still pretty entertaining in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way.
Let’s Murder Like It’s 1999! has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.