Strangers Beside Me

Lifetime Movie Review: Gone in the Night (1996)

Gone in the Night (1996) Shannen Doherty, Kevin Dillon

The persecution of Cynthia & David Dowaliby according to Cynthia & David Dowaliby

This is a four-hour made-for-CBS (but shown frequently on LMN) tv movie about the aftermath of the apparent abduction and subsequent murder of 7-year-old Jaclyn Dowaliby from her home in suburban Chicago in 1988. The Dowalibys lose custody of their son on abuse charges (that turn out to be false) while the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office focuses on railroading the parents for the crime. Cynthia is acquitted but David is found guilty and sentenced to 45 years, on approximately zero real evidence. (The case provides a cautionary tale about playing 12 Angry Men in real life. Jurors noticed dents in a door in a photograph of the family home that were discussed by neither the prosecution nor the defense, and assumed they were evidence of David’s violent temper; in fact, they’d been on the door when the Dowaliby’s moved into their home). David’s cause is taken up by a journalism professor at Northwestern, and eventually David’s conviction is overturned and their son is returned to the Dowalibys.

I don’t doubt any aspect of the account of the railroading, shoddy police work, and general lack of minimal ethics on the part of the State’s Attorney’s office or any law enforcement officers involved in the case; Cook County police agencies and prosecutors have done much worse, sometimes to defendants who seem to have been chosen almost at random. The movie blames the behavior of the prosecutors on then-State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley’s mayoral race, the theory being that he needed a conviction in this high-profile case to win the election. However, this strikes me as a bit like trying to multiply explanations for snow in January in Chicago. The treatment the Dowaliby’s received is actually pretty routine for Chicago law enforcement, and Daley probably didn’t have to put anyone in jail to beat poor old Eugene Sawyer in the primary. It’s just exactly the kind of thing he would have done from the Mayor’s office if he’d been in it at the time, or whether he’d had a campaign to worry about that year or not. The actor playing Daley portrays him as a basset hound, but really he’s more like a bulldog, and he pretty much always wants stuff to be DONE already.

However, as a Chicagoan of 20+ years, I have noticed that it’s next to impossible to describe how things work here to people who live in other cities. They just fundamentally don’t believe it can be as crazy as you say, and that you must be embellishing some. I think the political-campaign explanation is there just to make the case seem more plausible to outsiders.

My husband pointed out to me that if I decided it was my job to fact-check all of the true crime movies on Lifetime, I’d be busy, busy, busy. I’ll just point out that the Dowaliby case has never been solved, parents really are responsible for the deaths of their children about 95% of the time, and just because you can’t legitimately prove that somebody did something doesn’t mean they didn’t do it, it just means you can’t prove it. I found the schizophrenic uncle thrown in as an alternate suspect a little pat. Did he really make the thinly veiled confession to the Dowaliby’s attorney, and were the details as accurate as the movie implies? It’s hard to 100% trust a movie based on a book by the best suspects' main advocate, and that contains almost no details about the actual crime and ends with them appearing in person to tell you about a missing & exploited children’s hotline.

So, basically, I found the movie tragic and unsettling, but with a mildly creepy aftertaste.

Lifetime rating: **

Lifetime Movie Review: Whispers and Lies (2008)

Whispers & Lies (2008) Melissa Joan Hart, Susan Hogan

Intrepid high school teacher must survive an island full of vampires ... of science!

Lifetime spoilered this one big time by having a goth chick in the previews replying to Melissa Joan Hart/Jill’s query: “So … you’ve been a teenager …” “For a hundred and forty five years!”

Jill accompanies her cousin Patti to spend a week on a vacation island in New England with a handsome intriguing guy (Kevin) Patti met at the beach. The same night they arrive, Patti is attacked and injured by a mugger, and Kevin takes her off to get stitches. We see her with the doctor (Faye Croft), who notices a birthmark she has, and asks her if she knows what it means. It turns out, it’s a very specific kind of mark associated with a rare blood condition that confers extreme immunity to disease on its possessor.

Patti never returns to her vacation cabin, and Jill spends the next few days harassing the sheriff to do something and looking for Kevin and flirting with this cute artist guy Chris and reading about other dead tourists at the library and whatnot. Meanwhile, we learn that Jill has the same birthmark! Everywhere she goes, rushing hither and yon about the town in her ineffectual investigation, there are people standing around coughing and eyeballing her like she’s a big juicy steak, while you the viewer, having seen the preview, are sitting there thinking, Duh, Jill, everyone on the island has conspired to kill Patti so they can inject themselves with her blood and go on being immortal, it’s so OBVIOUS, what is wrong with you? And also, why aren’t they killing you yet instead of letting you run around annoying everyone, and why does the 145-year old teenager still totally act like a teenager?

These questions remain unanswered, but finally, Patti turns up dead, and the sheriff tells Jill she has drowned. JIll’s cute romantic interest has a bad cough too, and he redoubles his efforts to get her to leave the island, but she keeps having all these reasons why she can’t go yet. She does at least figure out a way to get into the morgue and check to make sure that her cousin didn’t drown (she’s a high school science teacher so of course she knows forensics) and to try to check Patti's blood, whereupon she discovers Patti doesn't have any anymore. At long last, Jill makes the connection between Patti's death and the very long line at the health clinic for people getting "flu shots" earlier that day, and the lightbulb goes on. She agrees to get out of Dodge with the sulky rebellious ancient teenage goth girl and Chris on his boat.

They’re stopped at the harbor by a mob of islanders, led by Dr. Croft! Jill points out that the injections don’t seem to be working as well as they used to, and that they’ve been having to kill people more and more often and yet many of the islanders are still deteriorating physically, and so they should just give up on the whole thing and let her go. So they do! While acting like it’s all Dr. Faye’s fault or something, keeping them imperfectly alive all those years when they could have gone and died in jail a long, long time ago. Well some people always think it’s all about them, don’t they Ms. Mad Scientist?

Lifetime rating: **

Lifetime Movie Review: Killers in the House (1998)

Killers in the House (1998) Mario van Peebles, Holly Robinson Peete

Rare male Lifetime protagonist of color overcomes abandonment issues by whaling on some bank robbers

The Sawyers and their young son leave their ghetto neighborhood in their beat-up economy car to go see a big house in the country that has been left to Rodney by the (white) father who abandoned him as a boy. He just wants to sell it as soon as possible, but his wife wants to move into it and start a new life. He resents his father too much to live in the house he built with his own hands! But then some bank robbers whose getaway plans have gone awry decide to take shelter in the house (the robbers are bank employees, one of whom knew about the property and expected it to be empty). The Sawyers and their son each act resourcefully in turn to defeat the bank robbers, who would have killed them (junior snatches and hides the money early on as a bargaining chip, but then accidentally leaves it in the fireplace and it burns up—oops!), and the house+ does its part by having lots of hidden extra closet space and dumbwaiters and multiple doors in and out of rooms and whatnot. However, the Sawyers' eventual victory is assured because the bank robbers are in it for the money, while the Sawyers are "in this together." Well, plus the guy who was in it to live on the beach forever with his one true love goes a little wackadoo after said girlfriend finally dies of wounds received during the course of the robbery.

We close with Jennie some time later showing guests around the house, which the Sawers now run as a country inn, while Rodney does some carpentry work on the façade.++ "We've been through a lot in this house! We could never leave."

+Symbolizing his dad!
++Symbolizing his reconciliation with his dad, because see now he's building the house.

You're welcome!

Lifetime rating: **

Themes

Here's a list of some of the themes I expect to be tagging in my movie and book reviews here. I'll be adding to this list and posting longer discussions of each as my review database grows and I'm able to flesh them out more with examples.

Abuse Excuse
The childhood abuse theory of human evil has largely replaced the theological one in most contemporary movies and fiction. In the Lifetime format, usually a brief pro-forma flashback or description is used to "explain" why a bad person is so very bad. It more often appears as a device to enhance the plausibility of floridly evil characters than as an actual subject of the drama, though sometimes the specific form of abuse has plot implications also.

Bad Girls
Usually sexually manipulative sociopaths, though occasionally there's a "normal" woman deranged by childlessness or infidelity. It's unknown whether most Lifetime viewers enjoy tales of bad women as an exercise in social disapproval and self-validation, or as vicarious pleasure in forbidden bad behavior. (I tend to vacillate between the two in the course of a viewing, but the latter usually wins. Shhh, don't tell anyone!) Either way, these are pretty much the most fun Lifetime movies there are, in my opinion.

Demon Lover
Oh no, my perfect new boyfriend/husband or latest date is a scary stalker or wife-killer! Maybe! I won't know for sure until I break into his apartment/office/computer ...

Gaslighting
Nobody else can see the unnerving things I see! Is someone trying to drive me crazy, or just trying to make me look crazy to people who might otherwise help me?

Kill My Husband
Or sometimes just maim my husband. Ripped straight from the pages of Jane Eyre! Husband is maimed or killed in the course of attempting either to kill you, or just to commit various evil acts while suffocating you with his crazy love. You get the house, the kids, and the money and maybe a hot new boyfriend if he dies, or all of the above (less the boyfriend) plus a non-threatening (and probably paralyzed) grateful object of your care if he lives. And absolutely none of this is your fault! Grim, yet surprisingly common!

Secret Identities
You suddenly discover your husband is a completely different person than you thought he was, usually some kind of dangerous criminal, usually after he has faked his own death. Play your cards right and you might get the money, but you've got to stop him from killing you first, which you will! Potentially aggravating subsequent marriage counseling is obviated by his death or arrest. This is really a subset of Kill My Husband, but I think the frequency of the faked-death plot rates its own category.

Stranger Danger
A criminal or group of criminals threaten a family, which in turn is in the midst of some kind of trial of its own. The family bonds by repelling the outsiders.

Stranger in the House
This has some features in common with fairy tales about changelings, and with Heathcliff (probably a Gypsy baby!) in Wuthering Heights. A woman lets a safe-seeming person into the house--it could be a renter, or a handyman, or someone posing as a long-lost relative--and must discover the truth in time to repel the danger before she or her family is killed.

Lifetime Facts for Women
Not really a theme, but I'd like to keep track of them anyway. These are bald-faced lies about how the world works--usually touching on the legal system, but sometimes we get fake science and technology facts also--that are inserted into a Lifetime movie script to make the plot work. Kind of.