Lifetime’s The Paramedic Who Stalked Me is creepy in a bad way

Lifetime

I have watched one Lifetime TV movie in my life, and it was the one with Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig that was supposed to be a spoof of Lifetime TV movies but it turned out not to be a spoof at all … or the writers and cast forgot what a spoof was supposed to look like. I even reviewed it for Hotchka.

So it was with great trepidation — and a bit of nudging — that I sat down for one of Lifetime’s weekly Saturday night movie premieres (with a ridiculous, and too on-the-nose title), The Paramedic Who Stalked Me (and according to IMDb, the original title was the even more on-the-nose Psycho Paramedic). Yep, that title basically tells you the entire plot of the movie. To quote Hotchka’s own Mandy Gunther, ‘Seriously? Seriously!’ (And this movie is also allegedly based on a true story!)

The plot, such as it is, centers around Chloe (Lexi Minetree), a high school student with an over-protective mother named Karen (Maeve Quinlan), because of course she is, sneaks out of her house to spend some time with her three friends. When Karen finds out Chloe is missing, she starts blowing up her phone and Chloe assures her that they are on the way home. Naturally, tragedy strikes when a third time offender drunk driver plows into the car, killing the driver, and injuring Chloe, her boyfriend Bryce and their friend Lexi. Mom hears the accident and calls 911, and the paramedics somehow find the location of the accident. Chloe in unconscious and hot paramedic Matt is instantly drawn to her, attending to her shallow breathing (and it seems like ‘shallow breathing’ is a theme in this movie, or Matt has some serious asthma) and … stealing her angel wings necklace.

The next day when Chloe is checking out of the hospital, she can’t find her keys or her necklace. Hot paramedic Matt pops in to check on her, helps her ‘find’ her keys — which he borrowed to make an imprint of the house key — but no luck with the necklace. But he promises to check around and minutes after she gets home who is knocking at the door but Matt. With the necklace! He claimed it was in the wreckage of the car but how did it come off? ‘These things happen,’ he assures her. Thinking this is the end of Matt’s unannounced visits, Chloe tries to get on with her life, but when she notices her prom picture has gone missing, and Karen felt like there was someone in the house one night (why, as a realtor, does Karen not have any security devices in her home?), Chloe knows that Matt had to have been the culprit. So she and Bryce somehow find the address of his house, meet a neighbor who assumes Chloe is the girlfriend Matt always talks about (and who we see in a few scenes with him), and discovers a shrine to Chloe in Matt’s bedroom. She also finds the picture of his girlfriend who … wait for it … is dead. And she had the same necklace as Chloe! Turns out she was killed in a car accident in 2010, and that is apparently what as set Matt off, projecting his loss onto Chloe, apparently hoping to relive the life he had planned out with his girlfriend.

Lifetime

When Matt discovers Chloe and Bryce were stalking him, he amps up his stalking, going after Bryce and Karen — and his own EMT partner who begins to suspect the shortage of certain drugs in their kit is a bit more than accidental — before snatching Chloe to give her the prom he never had. But Matt may have sealed his own fate when Chloe remembers that time he randomly showed up in her class to demonstrate basic CPR and the use of a defibrillator — on Bryce, no less — bringing the film to a ‘shocking’, and unintentionally hilarious, conclusion.

I have a feeling that these Lifetime ‘Women in Danger’ movies follow the same basic template making everything just a bit too predictable. The Paramedic Who Stalked Me was actually fun to watch, but I’m sure that isn’t what anyone involved intended. It verges on campy at points, and lends itself greatly to a Mystery Science Theater 3000-style talkback, responding to some of the dialog and situations. But I can see a group of friends getting together on a Saturday night with a few bottles of wine and some snacks to enjoy this film together. The cast puts as much sincerity into their roles as they can, and perhaps it’s that dead seriousness which makes it funnier than it should be. It is a bit on the creepy side too, but not how you’d expect. If you really do the math here, Matt’s prom was in 2010 so he was 17-18 then. If the film is set in the present, that would make him 30-31, stalking the 17-18 year old Chloe, putting this in a whole other category. Lexi Minetree (aka Lexi Jones) is making her feature debut here after appearing in eight short films and she does an admirable job. With the right project, she could have a decent career. I felt like she gave a really genuine performance and never really went over-the-top. Andrew Spach is absurdly handsome (a real plus for the Lifetime target audience — do the women these films play to find themselves rooting for the villains if they are handsome and charming?), and he does a good job of making Matt appear to Chloe as someone who is just genuinely looking out for her since he saved her life, while allowing the viewers to see that he does have a screw loose. It’s a performance that could easily teeter over the edge into parody, but he pulls it off (and then the whole thing does veer into parody, unfortunately, with the final scene).

Am I sorry I spent 90 minutes watching The Paramedic Who Stalked Me? Nah, it was fun enough, predictable enough that I could say out loud what was going to happen in the next scene, but it did what it set out to do, and that is simply entertain. I’ll give it some points for that.

The Paramedic Who Stalked Me has a run time of 1 h 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.

Lifetime