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LMN’s ‘Slay Bells’ series of movies comes to an end this week — and honestly, why even bother with the holiday sounding theme when only one of the movies this month had anything to do with Christmas? — with another standard mystery-thriller with one of the most bleak titles ever, Where Pretty Girls Die. This one is definitely not going to put you in the holiday mood.
The movie centers around Sienna Niland (Kim Sandwich), a young woman studying the psychology of serial killers in the hope of one day applying to Quantico to be the next Clarice Starling. She’s already proven her skills at solving cold cases with her Scooby Gang — or rather Sleuth Group — and a new arrival to the group, Tyler (Dillon Peyerk), comes in a little too hot, putting Sienna’s group co-founder Greg (Branden Greenberg) on high-ish alert. After Sienna is contacted by someone close to a girl named Lexi Palmer (who we see in the film’s prologue before she is abducted off-screen), who has been missing for four years and whose mother wants to have declared dead, Tyler suggests they head to Georgia to see if they can solve the case. That’s a bit of a problem for Sienna since she is supposed to accompany her boyfriend Marcus (John Machesky) to Cancun for his friend’s bachelor party weekend, but after she got the itinerary showing the boys would be off doing their thing while the bride-to-be and the other girls would be off on their own, the trip became less attractive to Sienna so this new case is the perfect excuse for her to bow out of the Cancun trip. She may later wish she had gone. Marcus isn’t thrilled, especially since it will only be her, Greg and Tyler, and they will be camping instead of staying in one of the two motels in the area (both apparently have bed bugs, or so she’s been told). Sienna assures Marcus that she will be safe, and Greg has no interest in her so he has nothing to worry about there, and she has her hunting knife handy in case Tyler tries to get handsy. But Greg has to bow out due to a fire at his apartment complex the night before their departure, and Sienna has second thoughts about going but Cancun sounds ickier than camping with a stranger. Not a ringing endorsement for the resort town.
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So off they go, and Tyler seems very over-eager to get started. He’s also very over-eager to get into Sienna’s tent, going so far as to alert her that he thought someone was messing with her car while they were sleeping, suggesting that perhaps it was the uncooperative detective they had met with earlier, who refused to let them see any files related to an open and ongoing case. The mother of Lexi, Tricia (Kylie Delre), already feels that Det. Norris (Britt George) has dropped the investigation but he assures her that there simply hasn’t been any new developments. After interviewing Tricia themselves, Sienna and Tyler head to the home of Ray Benton (Ben VanderMey), a stereotypical backwoods guy who seems to live off the grid but is known around town as the guy who can fix anything. So Sienna goes there with the pretense that she can’t get her glove compartment open, but ends up being locked in a ‘cell’ in the barn. She has no idea what happened to Tyler, but Ray assures her that he is locked up elsewhere, but later she hears Tyler confront Ray. She can barely see through the wood slats, but there is a gunshot and Tyler falls to the ground, apparently dead. Tricia then shows up at Ray’s to confront him about killing Lexi, but instead of leaving she parts among some trees and sees Sienna’s car go by … with Tyler driving. So he is working with Ray? It’s not long before Tricia is captured by Ray and tossed in with Sienna, and she reveals that Tyler is not as dead as Sienna thinks. Meanwhile in Cancun, Marcus is concerned that Sienna’s location tracking has been turned off and he contacts Greg, who offers to do some digging on Tyler … and soon discovers that he has a criminal past that is concerning enough for Marcus to leave Cancun right away in the hope that he can find his girlfriend before it’s too late — because the reason he wanted her to go on the trip with him was so he could propose. Awwwww. But can Sienna and Tricia escape from Ray before they become the newest stars of his latest snuff films?
Where Pretty Girls Die is a serviceable thriller. It does a decent job of setting up the disappearance of Lexi as we only hear her ask someone what they are doing there. Then it throws a whole bunch of red herrings at us including Lexi’s baby daddy (and killing off the kid was not really necessary, was it?), Tricia, Detective Norris, Ray and Tyler. The only people we can be sure of not being involved are Sienna, Marcus and Greg. The script, by Margaret Cole, and direction by Christine Conradt, do a good job of making everyone seem like a suspect. The detective seems to have an issue with Tricia, and it’s revealed that his daughter and Lexi did not get along, with the detective making rude suggestions about Lexi’s morals with claims that she stole his daughter’s boyfriend and got pregnant. The boyfriend, when questioned by Sienna and Tyler, sets the record straight that he’d already broken up with the detective’s daughter before he got with Lexi, and despite what anyone thinks he did not kill her to take the baby. Because that’s what Tricia and others believe. But Tricia herself is made to look suspicious at one point, and Ray is definitely sketchy. But it’s all a bit undone by some of the performances.
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Kim Sandwich does a nice job as Sienna. It’s nice that she’s been written as totally professional, she loves her boyfriend, she’s not getting into any shenanigans with Tyler, so that is actually refreshing. Sandwich’s performance is pretty matter of fact, a ‘just the facts’ person who is truly devoted to helping the families of missing persons get some kind of closure. Sandwich just makes Sienna a strong woman who has set her priorities straight. Dillon Peyerk is a bit of a problem as Tyler. He comes in as a bit of a know-it-all, but his performance is fifty shades of shadey and within ten minutes of his arrival, I said, ‘He did it.’ There’s also a mention of the character being thirty-three, and if that’s true he’s got some kind of Benjamin Button stuff going on. Peyerk looks to be in his early 20s, so if he is in his 30s in real life … what is his skin care regimen? Inquiring minds want to know. But his performance veers from sincere to suspect, so the director should have guided him a bit more to make the ‘surprise’ of his involvement more of a surprise.
Kylie Delre plays Tricia as a mother determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and even though her desire to have Lexi declared dead seems questionable, it actually makes sense when she explains that the determination would take the case away from Detective Norris and over to a different division. But there are also moments in her performance that also make it seem like she is hiding something, and that is always one of my biggest quibbles with these movies. The actors should not have to change their performance to telegraph to the audience that they have to believe they may be a suspect. If everyone just acted naturally, the surprises would be much more impactful. It’s the same with Britt George as Detective Norris. In his scenes with Tricia, and Sienna and Tyler, you are made to think right away that he’s covering up something. There’s nothing subtle about him. He’s just hot-headed with everyone until the end when he actually does something very nice after the real culprits are identified and dealt with. Ben VanderMey really pours on the backwoods redneck character, grunting a lot his dialogue, always on the verge of being totally unhinged, just a step down from Bryant Carroll’s hillbilly-ish Cal in My Mother the Madame, not quite that over-the-top but treading dangerously close to the edge, quite obviously the prime suspect the moment Sienna sets eyes on him. Then he does teeter into caricature just a bit when he comes to make his snuff films with Sienna and Tricia, but freaks out because the light bulb in their pen ‘burnt out’ and the hardware store ain’t open at that time of night! Toning it down would have made his menace feel more frightening.
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John Machesky is very good as Marcus. He plays the character very level-headed, he doesn’t fly off the handle with Sienna withdraws from the trip, he supports her career goals, and he is always concerned about her safety even while he’s supposed to be partying in Cancun. Branden Greenberg is also good as Greg in his little bit of screen time, on the same sort of professional level as Sienna but a little more cautious about Tyler than she is, and more than happy to do some digging to see what he’s all about. So the performances are a mixed bag, mostly good but they just needed a bit more directorial guidance to keep them more authentic and less ‘I did it’ with their behaviors. All in all, it’s a passable thriller with maybe one surprise that isn’t completely telegraphed by the script. It’s not a total waste of time, but it certainly has nothing to do with the holidays!
Where Pretty Girls Die has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.