Lifetime
The holidays are over, the new year has begun and Lifetime returns to its regular ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ series of movies with a thriller curiously titled Mama’s Little Murderer, probably the most clickbait title the network has ever attached to a movie. I’m willing to bet this was not the original title of the movie but … there is not a single bit of information about it online, not even on the actors’ social media accounts or the production companies’ websites, so this is a curious film that everyone seems to want to hide for some reason. But why?
Mama’s Little Murderer begins with a young man bound and gagged, having been kidnapped and left in the forest. Three weeks earlier, we see that young man is college student Anthony, who is being informed by the Dean of his college that he’s being suspended for the rest of the semester due to a physical altercation he had with another student who pushed all of his buttons. Anthony retaliated by giving the other guy a third degree burn with a hot spoon, but nothing close to attempting murder. What the scene may be trying to set up is that Anthony has a temper and, unchecked, could be dangerous. Anthony returns home, we assume at the end of the semester (and where he stayed until then is unclear), but keeps up the ruse with his mother Constance that everything is fine and dandy. Anthony doesn’t know at that time that his mom has started dating a man named Leo, and they are getting serious to the point that she’s on the verge of asking him to move in with her (technically he asked her since his lease is almost up, but she has to see how Anthony would react first). Anthony quickly puts two-and-two together when he sees two toothbrushes in the bathroom, forcing her to fess up. It’s clear that Anthony isn’t keen on his mother dating anyone, although it’s not clear why? Was there a messy divorce and he hopes mom and dad will reconcile? Is dad dead, and he doesn’t think mom should disrespect his memory by inviting another man into her life? Or is he just an overly possessive mama’s boy who thinks he should be the only man in her life getting attention?
Lifetime
The story begins to jump back and forth in time once Constance finds a burner phone and a note alerting her that her son has been abducted. She gets a call that she needs to go to the bank and withdraw $100,000 cash and bring it to a specified location and Anthony will be returned. It’s pretty presumptuous on the part of the kidnappers to assume Constance has $100,000 cash in the bank simply because she has nice house. As it is quickly made clear, Anthony knows his kidnappers, one being his old high school pal Mitch, the other an acquaintance of Mitch’s, Booth. Pre-kidnapping, Anthony started hanging out with them and telling them how much he hates Leo, and they cook up all kinds of schemes to get Constance to dump him. First, Anthony manages to get into Leo’s phone and email (Leo basically held the phone in front of Anthony’s face and entered his pass code in the movie’s most eye-rolling scene), found that Leo is pretty boring but there was an email from a woman named Laura, Leo’s ex, so Anthony set up a filter to forward Leo’s emails from her to him and he started a conversation as Leo … and invited her to the house! Naturally, that did not go well when Constance answered the door, but Leo assured her he absolutely did not invite Laura to the house in the middle of the afternoon when she would be there and he wouldn’t. Makes sense. Since that didn’t work, Anthony decided to really scare Leo off by … siphoning the brake fluid out of Leo’s car, hoping to cause just a minor accident (perhaps this is where the title comes from?), but that plan goes awry when his mom and Leo are planning to see a matinee of a show the day after he drained the brake fluid. Having to think quick, Anthony pretended he was sick and needed to go to the hospital, but mom felt his forehead and told him he was fine. Just as they were about to go out the door, Anthony broke a glass and slashed his hand, so that kept Constance out of the car but she sent Leo to get some bandages, which led to his accident and a quick trip to the hospital. The story begins to get a little confusing bouncing back and forth with Anthony denying he had anything to do with the accidents or luring Laura to the house, Constance asking Leo to move out for a while even though he has nowhere to go, the three of them going on a weekend getaway to a cabin … which gives Anthony his next scheme: giving Mitch and Booth the security code to the house so they can ‘break in’ and steal a bunch of stuff, somehow making it seem like Leo had something to do with it. This is probably the worst thought out of his plans. Booth is a bit of a loose cannon, and it’s he who convinces Mitch that burglary is small potatoes so they have to go big — kidnap Anthony and get the cash. Easy peasy. Of course, these plans never work out as anticipated, especially when Constance and Leo catch on to who is behind the kidnapping (and for a while, it seems that Anthony may even be in on it but Booth is way too out of control and they certainly wouldn’t keep him bound and gagged until necessary if he was in on the plan) and take matters into their own hands to save Anthony. But will everyone survive mostly unscathed, and can Constance and Leo (if he survives) ever forgive Anthony?
There is a lot going on in this movie, and if you are someone who has a hard time with nonlinear storytelling then this one may be difficult to follow as the only reference to time comes between seeing Anthony in the forest alone and then seeing him in the Dean’s office ‘Three Weeks Earlier’. From that point it’s up to you to keep track of what scene is in the present and what scene is in the past and how far in the past those scenes are. You may need a road map to keep track of all the different routes the story takes. But if you can keep track, writer Dane K. Braun has constructed a pretty solid thriller, even with some of the more over-the-top instances of Anthony trying to get Leo out of his house. Draining the brake fluid is pretty drastic, but that was easily pinned on Laura, who was extremely angry when she found Constance at the address she thought Leo would be at. Trying to pin a burglary on Leo was also a little bizarre, like, how would Constance even think for a minute that was true? If you can overlook some of the more ridiculous plot points and keep track of the timeline, it still makes for a pretty decent thriller. Director Andrew Parkes and his editor also do a nice job of juggling the timeline so it isn’t too confusing, but this isn’t a movie you can just put on in the background and try to keep track of. It’s actually a good thing that viewers have to pay attention. If you’re curious about where the movie was filmed, there is one thing that gives it all away. The license plates on the cars all say Ohio, but the address of house used as Constance’s home is clearly on display (and is even mentioned), 2 Pringle Place, which with a quick Google Maps search, pinpoints the location to St. John’s, Newfoundland. You can even see the actual house using the Street View! (Sticking around until the end of the credits also confirms the movie was shot in Newfoundland and Labrador, so it’s curious that some online sites are puzzled by the actual location.) Even more curious is the total lack of information about this movie online (at the time of this writing). There is nothing on IMDb. None of the actors have the movie on their credits. None of them mention it on their social media accounts. Lifetime has basically buried it on their website, and none of the production companies have it listed among their productions either. This is a bigger mystery than anything going on in the movie! Why is everyone involved hiding this movie … and why does it have such a ridiculous title?!?! I was expecting a sort of Bad Seed child orchestrating the deaths of people they didn’t like, not an overly possessive son jealous of his mom’s new boyfriend. It’s just all extremely perplexing.
Lifetime
That being said, the cast all do some really good work. Sara Canning makes Constance a really good mom. She wants to ease the subject of a boyfriend into the conversation with her son, but he forces her hand so she has to be a bit more blunt than she wanted. Despite what Anthony has constructed in his mind, Constance is always considerate of his feelings, but she needs to be happy as well, and Canning does a really nice job of balancing all of the emotions that Constance has to deal with. Even when she has to confront her son about the emails and the car, she still gives him the benefit of the doubt even if in the back of her mind she’s still a bit suspicious. Canning really pulls it all together with her performance. Isaac Kragten is also very good as Anthony, it just would have been nice if the script gave him some motivation for his behavior. He does a great job of being subtly nefarious and then turning on the mama’s boy persona — which never really works because, as Anthony is told by the Dean and his mother — ‘you’re an adult.’ But he still tries. That being said, Kragten still manages to balance Anthony’s behavior (perhaps he was given more motivation by the director than the audience was by the movie), keeping the viewer guessing as to what he may do next (and always wondering when he’s going to resort to murder because of the title). He manages to be dangerous without being obviously dangerous, playing nice with Leo while he’s plotting to erase him from their lives. In the end it is quite chilling and credit goes to Kragten for his good work.
Ian Kilburn manages to make Leo as boring as Anthony thinks he is. He tries to be friendly with Anthony, assuring him that he’s not trying to come between him and his mother, and he never loses his temper even after the Laura situation or the near death experience which he absolutely believes was Anthony’s work but won’t push it with Constance because he knows for sure that would push her away. So Kilburn’s Leo is present in the scenes but he often fades into the background or has to play second fiddle to Anthony. But that’s likely how the character was conceived and how Kilburn was directed to play Leo, so for that he did a good job. Noah Perchard is also good as Mitch. He seems like the high school stoner who has no real direction in life, living alone in a sad little basement apartment (it’s unclear if this is perhaps in his mother’s basement), easily influenced by much stronger personalities like Booth. Even though he’s Anthony’s age, he’s still a kid who needs some kind of guidance so he doesn’t continue to go down a bad path, because hanging around with Booth is only going to land him behind bars … or worse. Paul Thompson is also good as Booth, also a guy with no clear path in life except one of crime. He doesn’t seem to have a job, and he seems a bit older than Mitch and Anthony, but he’s clearly a danger, a hot head ready to explode if any of his plans go awry. He is quite scary in the final scenes as a couple of characters’ lives hang in the balance during a confrontation with him. Lauren Vandenbrook also makes the most of her one scene as Laura, showing utter confusion when Constance answers the door, then quickly flying into a rage when she thinks Leo has led her on again, alleging that he’ll get bored with Constance and will want Laura to come crawling back again, like she just did this time. It’s a brief scene, but Vandenbrook makes it memorable.
Overall, Mama’s Little Murderer is probably the worst title Lifetime has ever affixed to a movie, because it applies to nothing in the story. The time jumping back and forth may confuse some, but it lends a certain dynamic to the storytelling. The uniformly excellent cast helps keep things from going off the rails completely, and the direction deftly juggles all of the story elements. Some of the plot points are silly, and had they been a little more believable this could have been one of Lifetime’s better presentations, but it’s still pretty decent, and worth a watch. Now if we could just figure out why everyone involved is trying to hide this movie.
Mama’s Little Murderer has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.