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When tuning in to LMN’s newest thriller The Wrong Obsession, I thought I recognized the name of the director, David DeCoteau, and did a quick IMDb check and found that I did know the name and one of his films but… I also discovered there is an entire series of ‘The Wrong…’ TV movies dating back to 2016, 27 movies total including this one, all directed by DeCoteau and all starring Vivica A. Fox (in different roles). After enduring The Wrong Obsession, I began to ponder the meaning of life and how on earth this could be the 27th movie of this franchise.
The Wrong Obsession ‘stars’ Vivica A. Fox … and we put that in quotes because though she gets top billing, she’s in the movie for less than ten minutes total (but she’s now an executive producer so she can bill herself wherever she wants, but it’s actually more notable if you’re at the end of the credits with an ‘And’ before your name). Fox plays Sabrina, the owner/manager/CEO (?) of some kind of marketing firm (I think, it’s never really clear because the only client we ever hear about is a small movie theater chain they are trying to woo from another agency) where an employee abruptly quits, leaving the position open. Sabrina asks Lisa (Gina Hiraizumi) to fill in until someone can be hired, and when Gina asks for the position herself, Sabrina says she’d love to give it to her but she has to see other potential hires from outside the company because of HR (and let me tell you, at this office, hiring someone should be the least of HR’s problems, maybe focus on receptionist Stevey). While Lisa apparently keeps working her job and picking up the slack at the other job, there’s also another new hire coming in, a man named Jake … who just happened to go to college with Lisa — AND they dated for a very short time. What Lisa, who is married but is having some struggles as her husband Mark is working constantly to make partner at his law firm, doesn’t know is that Jake has just broken up with his girlfriend Paula … because he’s still in love with Lisa (which the couple had been in therapy to address).
But all seems well and Jake and Lisa take lunch together to chat and catch up (and lunch was about five minutes after they got to work), and when Lisa went to the ladies’ room, Jake stole her keys from her purse. Later she and Mark go out to dinner, and then later (the next day?) they are lounging by their pool unaware that Jake is slinking around the house dressed like it’s the middle of winter, letting himself in and planting tiny cameras in the living room and bedroom so he can spy on Lisa. On another work lunch, Jake and Lisa run into Paula’s best friend Mandi, who let’s them know how she feels about what she believes is a new relationship for Jake, but Lisa is still a bit clueless and brushes it off. Later, Paula drops by Jake’s apartment (which seems to be just a room with a bed) to pick up a few things she forgot (she knows where they are because there’s only one other piece of furniture in the room), discovers Jake’s spy cam viewing and threatens to tell Lisa and the police, but all she ends up leaving with is a golf club in her skull (and the way the scene is edited, it seems like Jake just left her in laying in the hallway so he could get back to his pervy spying). Lisa does become concerned as Jake is getting a bit more open about his feelings, leading to a staged fall at a bar to make it look like Mark threw him to the ground (and if anyone looked at the security video it was so clear the fall was fake that Stevie Wonder and Helen Keller would have known), and then Jake shows up at the house again, goading Mark into punching him so he could file charges and get Mark arrested (all Mark had to do was say Jake was trespassing and he was defending his home but the detective who couldn’t tell the fall at the bar was staged took Jake’s side and arrested Mark — and why is a detective involved in a simple assault charge?). Lisa gets the promotion and moves to the weirdest office ever with black panels on the walls and no source of light other than the flashlight that is always pointing at Lisa’s face no matter where she is, and Sabrina overhears Jake and Lisa having words about his behavior, leading to Jake being let go (his position, she says, was always probationary). But does this put an end to his stalking? Of course not! More silliness ensues, including Jake’s shoes changing from one shot to the next, and Vivica getting to say, ‘Girl, you just got involved in … the wrong obsession’, with a straight face (making me curious to know if she says something like this referring to the title in every ‘Wrong’ movie, like ‘Girl, you just got involved with … the wrong cheer captain’). In the end, nothing is resolved, Lisa and Mark never discover the cameras with the apparent infinitely powered batteries, and the final shot makes Jake look like Norman Bates at the end of Psycho looking into the camera so Vivica can come back for Part 2 and say, ‘Girl, you just got involved in … the wrong obsession again’ (yes, that’s what I’m assuming the follow-up will be called … if there is a follow-up, or do they all end on unresolved cliffhangers?).
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The Wrong Obsession is one of the most egregiously stupid movies LMN has given us in a while. The screenplay by Robert Dean Klein has dialogue that sounds like it’s either from someone who’s never written before or some AI program created it. It really is the most simplistic dialogue you could have in a movie, and I feel bad for the actors who had to recite those lines. Actually, you may wonder if the actors know the dialogue is that bad because their performances seem to be trying hard to make what they have to say sound logical or credible, often over-acting way too hard (like Morgan Bradley as office gadfly Joanne, who just pops in and out of a scene to chew the scenery and bug out her eyes). Poor Daniel Joo (Mark) is reduced to scrunching up his face — a lot — to convey any emotion, while Grisselle Escotto (Mandi) and Ciarra Carter (Paula) are just written as ‘angry black women’. Gina Hiraizumi has a wild range of emotions as Lisa, sometimes from one line to the next, often making it difficult to tell just exactly what she’s feeling. Is she afraid of Jake, or does she just think he’s a harmless old flame? She never really seems to be able to reassure Mark there’s nothing to worry about because every time she mentions something creepy Jake has done, she just brushes it off. Matthew Pohlkamp is actually the most consistent in his performance, able to balance the normalcy he’s supposed to have in the office setting, while slowly building on his obsessive feelings (even though Lisa is written in such a way that she doesn’t seem to notice). It’s really hard to tell if the writing is to blame for the most amateurish performances, or if they were just not given any direction during a scene because of the $12.00 budget. I actually felt a little embarrassed for them by the time the credits rolled (although several of the actors besides Fox have appeared in more than one ‘The Wrong…’ movie), but at least they’re getting work.
For a prolific director of very low-budget movies — DeCoteau has more than 180 films to his credit including a series of 1313 and The Brotherhood films — you’d think he’d be able to make the most for his money here but you’d be wrong. Scenes are cobbled together with some totally mismatched stock footage, the most glaring being the office building where everyone works. The building seen from the outside is clearly not the same building we see everyone enter from the reception area, which from the inside looks like a strip mall with a completely different address than the one adorning the outside. Then there is the aforementioned shot of Jake’s shoes changing from gray to white from one shot to the next (and why is he bundled up like it’s winter?). Then there is the lighting. In every shot featuring Hiraizumi, it seems like someone was standing just off camera with a light aimed directly at her face. No one else is lit like this so you can’t ignore the glow. In some scenes, notably that ridiculously black office, you can clearly see the one light being used in a reflection and it’s close enough to Hiraizumi so make her glow hard but not strong enough to actually fill the void of the room. Other scenes it looks like everyone is lit from below. I don’t know who the lighting director was, but they need to take some lessons on how to bounce light to fill a room and make it look natural, even in a totally black room apparently without windows. If the budget is an issue, you can get cheap light kits from Temu these days. At least the sound was good.
To put it plainly, The Wrong Obsession is just bad. But it’s bad enough that you can watch it with a group and cackle at how bad it is. That would be the only reason to willfully give up 90 minutes of your time.
The Wrong Obsession has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.