The Psycho She Met Online (2017) Reviews

• Disappointment from Christine Conradt

  mgconlan-12017-04-24

  On Sunday, April 23 Lifetime ran two "Premiere" movies — unusually given that Saturday is night they usually reserve for these sorts of shows — including one called "The Psycho She Met Online" which, despite its formula title, I had hopes for because Christine Conradt was the screenwriter and her frequent collaborator, Curtis James Crawford, was the director. Alas, this time around Conradt put all too little flesh on the bones of her (and Lifetime's) usual formula. This time the heroine is Karen Hexley (Chelsea Hobbs), an emergency medical technician (EMT) in Philadelphia who makes national headlines when the man whose life she saves after he's involved in a car accident is her husband Andrew (Matthew Lawrence, who for some reason wears his hair long in a "do" that makes him look like Caitlyn Jenner immediately before her final transition), even though she hadn't known when she went out on the call that the victim would indeed be he. The titular psycho she's going to meet online is Miranda Breyers (Charity Shea — inevitably I find myself wondering if she has sisters named Faith and Hope), who answers Karen's ad to rent out her spare room on "Vacay 'n' Stay," a fictitious Web site obviously patterned on Airbnb — yes, it's Lifetime's latest attempt to keep up with the times and plug their familiar formulae into the world of smartphones and apps. Having already given us a rapist who meets his victims by being an Uber driver, now they have a psycho locating her victim via Airbnb (or something very much like it). Of course, one key element of the formula is that the heroine has to have a best friend who cottons onto the game the psycho is really playing even as she poses as nice 'n' perky to win the heroine's trust — though in this story that role is split between two people. One is Aubrey Hunt (Alexis Maitland), Karen's sorority "sister" from college — with whom she's sustained a strong relationship since she was (at least as far as she knows) an only child and never had a real biological sister — and the other is her other "Vacay 'n' Stay" tenant, a charming old British nature photographer named Evander Swanson (Robert Welch) whom Miranda ambushes and kills because he's getting too nosy about her and her background and she's worried he will find her out. Exactly what there is to find out about her remains a mystery: when we first meet Miranda she's in Portland, Oregon, living with a creepy layabout boyfriend who bears a striking resemblance to the late Kurt Cobain, only without the scraggly beard, and when he tries to keep her from leaving she kicks him in the balls until he falls down, then kicks him again with the stiletto heel of one of her shoes (which, it's later established, she stole from a store and did a three-month jail sentence for shoplifting) and walks out. Her departure for Philadelphia, where the main part of the story takes place, is explained by her seeing a story about Karen Hexley saving her husband's life on the Internet, and at first we (or at least I) think she recognized Andrew as a former boyfriend and wanted revenge on the woman who took him away from her. When Miranda shows up in Philadelphia and "randomly" answers Karen's Vacay 'n' Stay ad, she's as sweet as can be at first but also awesomely possessive about Karen, to the point of bugging her bedroom with a video camera (one wonders if she's interested in eavesdropping while Karen and Andrew are having sex, but as it turns out that's about the last of her concerns) and going into a jealous hissy-fit when she sees how closely bonded Karen and her sorority sister Aubrey are. Miranda — who tells Karen she's working as a personal trainer but is actually a stripper — also sets out to seduce Andrew's brother Tyler (Yani Gellman), apparently as a means of bonding ever closer to Karen's family, since she's already told Karen that she's her half-sister — Karen's mom had an affair with Miranda's dad while still married to Karen's dad. Christine Conradt's usual trademark as a Lifetime writer is moral ambiguity — she likes to make her villains complex characters so we feel for them even as we root for the rather simple-minded heroines (or, more rarely, heroes) they're attempting to entrap — but on this script she offered us way too little on What Made Miranda Run and mostly ran the Lifetime cliché machine on autopilot. Either that or she was rewritten: this was actually filmed under the title The Guest She Met Online and changed to the more florid and obvious title The Psycho She Met Online, and while no other writer is credited it's possible someone rewrote Conradt's script, not enough to qualify for credit but enough to make the film itself, as well as its title, more blatantly black-and-white in its morality. The acting is O.K. — no one really stands out, and Chelsea Hobbs is such a blah screen presence it's hard to root for her (especially since Conradt makes her a whiz at her job — though one would think that in the final scene, once her own life was no longer in danger she'd make a bee-line to her wounded husband and treat him, and she doesn't — but a dolt in virtually everything else), while Charity Shea delivers a good but by-the-numbers performance as the titular psycho: she's engagingly evil but we've seen this sort of acting in a million other Lifetime movies. And the men are simply along for the ride, though Yani Gellman has some nice moments when he realizes the woman he's just taken home and screwed is his sister-in-law and he's revolted because it feels incestuous even though they're not biological kin.

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• Terrible

  krahnic-445762019-01-24

  Just curious how they figure they can make $4000/month renting out a room lol...

• So, so bad

  blondeblue12018-06-16

  To call this movie lame and badly-acted would be an understatement. It's so ridiculous and contrived that it's unwatchable. And did I mention that the acting is really, REALLY bad? I've never seen or heard of any of these people before, and I never will again.

• Acting was atrocious.

  dplimmer-098922019-01-11

  Typical Canadian made movie. The over acting on the part of the 'psycho' made it hard to watch. Everyone else was fine, she just went over the top.

• ***

  edwagreen2017-09-12

  The common denominator holds of entering someone's life and then creating havoc. I have to admit that the conditions that led to this psycho's entrance was way off, but yet quite effective to the story. With her EMT's husband sidelined by a car accident, they decide to rent the room and in the process discover some character, who had the beginning is a delight to have around. Go know that her secret life is that of a go-go dancer and she has evil intentions of entering their lives. Go know that the EMT's mother who was thought to have committed suicide was also the mother of our psycho and she flatly refused to acknowledge the daughter she had given up years before. The evil daughter Miranda has that evil eye about her. Anyone coming into her orbit, including the other renter, is doomed. She even tries to make this a family affair by falling for her brother-in-law's brother. Committing identity theft is another of her measures used to get even with the half-sister who obviously was the favorite of the dead mother. Of course, suicide was not the reason for the latter's demise.

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