by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on a Lifetime movie
having its “world premiere,” The Girl He Met Online, which turned out to be surprisingly engaging even though
it was very much to the Lifetime formula — one of those in which Christine
Conradt was not involved directly but it’s clear the people who were have absorbed her plot templates and situations and know
how to crank these things out at least as well as the Old Mistress. The
directors (plural) were Curtis Crawford (in previous productions he’s been
Curtis James Crawford) and Anthony
Lefresne (though CRAWFORD’s name was in BIG LETTERS across the screen and Lefresne’s
was in tiny type below it) and the credited writer was David DeCrane, but
overall it’s pretty much a chip off the old Christine Conradt block. When the
movie starts we see the girl some poor sap is going to meet online, Gillian
Casey (played by Yvonne Zima as a blonde, though otherwise with the same
kewpie-doll appeal of Rose MacGowan in the first Devil in the Flesh movie from 1998 and Jodi Lyn O’Keefe in the 2000
sequel), trashing the home of her previous boyfriend, spray-painting everything
in sight she can’t render totally nonfunctional (like his TV — she sprays the
letters “TV” behind where it used to be — and his stereo). We get the point
immediately: this is a girl that doesn’t take rejection well.
What’s most
interesting about The Girl He Met Online
is that David DeCrane gives Gillian such a hellish background — her real
parents died in a car accident when her age was still in the low single digits,
and she and her sister Bethany (I presume she’s played by Tara Spencer-Nairn,
who’s listed by imdb.com as playing “Beatrice Casey,” but this wouldn’t be the
first time imdb.com was caught short by a filmmakers’ change in character name
between scripting and actual shooting) were adopted by Agatha Casey
(Mary-Margaret Humes), who made it clear to Gillian throughout her childhood
that she never loved or cared about her and the only reason she adopted her was
she wanted to raise Bethany and the adoption agency insisted that the sisters
come as a package deal. Gillian has literally slept her way into a nice job as receptionist with
an OB-GYN, Dr. Harris Kohling (Gary Hudson), who insists on her performing
sexual services for him whenever his wife is out of town, which seems to be a
lot. But that hasn’t stopped her from trying to land a rich guy whom she can
get to marry her and Take Her Away from All That. Her current target is Andy
Collins (Shawn Roberts, at least marginally cuter than most of Lifetime’s leading men), who
works for a software company founded by his father and managed since dad’s
death by his mom Susan (Caroline Redekopp), and whose sister Heather (Samantha
Madely) is also a major player in the firm.
Most of the film is taken up by
Gillian’s intense pursuit of Andy and her ability to look normal and even
genuinely charming when she’s on her best behavior, though as the plot
progresses the obstacles start to trip her up and writer DeCrane seems to go
out of his way to put Gillian in contact with people who can expose the worst
sides of her character: a clerk at a high-end boutique from which she
shoplifted a blouse and who happens
to come to a charity event that Andy has taken Gillian to; her ex-boyfriend
Tony (Scott Gibson), who wants $10,000 in blackmail money for her having
trashed his place and destroyed a $15,000 painting in the process; and
ultimately Heather Collins, who spots her with Dr. Kohling in a fancy hotel
where Heather has gone to wine and dine a potential client and Gillian has gone
to give Dr. Kohling a weekend-long sexual joyride in exchange for the $10,000
to pay off Tony. Heather confronts Gillian while on a hotel staircase — big
mistake, as Gillian pushes her down the stairs — and then drugs Dr. Kohling for
reasons DeCrane doesn’t make all that clear but seem to have something to do with trying to meet up with Andy
and salvage the situation — only Andy is already onto her because Heather left
a message on his cell phone before her untimely demise. Eventually, of course,
all Gillian’s lies unravel and the cops, to whom Andy reported his suspicions
about her involvement in his sister’s death, catch her in the act of strangling
her adoptive mother and arrest her — and for once there isn’t a coda, as there’s been in several other Lifetime
productions on this basic theme, hinting that the villainess from hell (or at
least from heck) is going to get out of it by batting her eyes and seducing the
arresting officer into letting her go so she can leave town and continue her
criminal activities elsewhere.
What I liked about The Girl I Met
Online was the writing of Gillian’s character
— though Curtis Crawford and Anthony Lefresne are hardly in Alfred Hitchcock’s
league as masters of suspense (nor is DeCrane anywhere nearly as good as the
writers Hitchcock used), they do
manage to play the double game Hitchcock pulled off in a number of his films:
making the villain, if not sympathetic, at least attractive and put-upon enough
we’re kept hoping he — or, as here, she — will get away with it even as we know
his or her actions are evil and she deserves arrest and punishment. I also give
DeCrane kudos for ending the film with a quite normal-seeming arrest; Gillian
may have her mom in mortal danger but at least she’s not wielding a gun or a
knife, and she’s taken down by one police officer instead of half the U.S.
military. I found The Girl She Met Online quite nice and sleazy fun — though Charles liked it less than I do
because the points of sympathy DeCrane and the directors were trying to build
for Gillian’s character totally eluded him; Charles read her as a black-hearted
villainess from the get-go. Incidentally, the official Lifetime synopsis refers
to her as “bipolar,” but though there are hints of that in the film itself (notably Bethany’s and
her husband’s determination that Anna needs “help”), this is not the sort of “psychological thriller” that was big in
the 1950’s in which Freud’s ideas (then considered timeless truths and now
almost universally rejected) were trotted out to “explain” the bad guys and
make us wish they could be treated, not imprisoned or killed.
