Deadly Lessons (2017) Reviews

• Mmhh, where did I see this movie before?

  Stanley392017-03-18

  Heroine young student is seduced by handsome professor. Loser ex- boyfriend kid and female best friend snoop on them. Heroine and professor are caught red handed and he is fired, and she elopes with him. All very romantic. They move into cabin with nearby neighbors who all know about the professor's dark past, two previous wives mysteriously disappeared. Hey, dude, why not move into a cabin on the other side of town instead? Sounds familiar? Sure, because it is one of the five or so standard plots for Lifetime movies. Anything new in this one? No, not really. Heroine finally confronts hubby and he reveals all. Physical fight ensues. The young, small thin heroine knocks out the strong, fit, angry husband four times. Yes, four times! And in the last one she physically throws him off a bridge to his death. Really? I worry about our young daughters who watch these movies and become convinced that they can overpower and kill strong, burly angry men in real life.

• Seen over 65 Lifetime movies.....this is 65/65

  Carriexoc2019-04-24

  One sentence for you...... BOY BEHIND THE TREE In every scene. Bad directing. Bad editing. Bad script. Feel bad for the actors.

• More sophisticated than the Lifetime norm

  mgconlan-12017-03-19

  Lifetime did the director (David DeCoteau) and writers (Eve Holdway and Taj Nagaoka) of "Deadly Lessons" no favors by scheduling the "world premiere" of their movie right after the "world premiere" of "Infidelity in Suburbia" because the juxtaposition of the two heightened their formula similarities, when "Deadly Lessons" was actually a much finer, more moving and more entertaining piece of work. This time the damsel who unbeknownst to her has just sent distress an engraved invitation is a college student named Lisa (Christie Burson), a third-year undergraduate with ambitions to be a doctor, and in the opening scene she's with her friends Tiffany (Sammi Barber) and Patrick (James Drew Dean — obviously he uses the middle name because just "James Dean" was rather famously taken over 60 years ago; he's nowhere near as hot and sexy as his namesake but he's easy enough on the eyes) attending a class in ethics being taught by Michael Harris (Ryan Scott Greene). Michael is a younger version of the tall, lanky, sandy-haired types Lifetime generally likes for their middle-aged leading men — usually as the husband the heroine is being sorely tempted to stray from — and for some reason he has to hold his lecture class outside on the campus lawn. (Is this university — an unnamed college in the Pacific Northwest so it can be "played" by locations in British Columbia, Canada — that crowded that he's leading what amounts to an overflow class?) Michael is giving Lisa a hard time in class and, when the bell rings, he rather peremptorily announces to her that he expects her to meet him in his office immediately. We're expecting that he's going to hit on her, perhaps blackmailing her into having sex with him in return for a better grade, but — surprise!— as soon as they get into the office and close the door, they start sucking face. They're already lovers, and what's more, she's as happy about that as he is. Only Tiffany and Patrick are spying on the lovebirds and use their smartphones to catch them being affectionate at Michael's home that night — and they report him to the dean (Cedric De Souza). The dean immediately asks Michael to resign, but promises him a good recommendation so he can still get a job somewhere else in academe, and he says Lisa can continue at the college and it won't go on her record that she slept with a professor. No way, says Lisa: where my man goes, I go — even though that means losing the tuition she already paid for that semester, losing her chance to continue in college and losing her relationship with her mother, who announces to her that if she does such a dumb thing as sacrifice her education and her ambitions for some guy, mom wants nothing to do with her anymore. Michael and Lisa get married at city hall and move to Seattle, where he's landed another teaching gig and they rent a house by a lake with a spectacular view. Lisa gets invited to a faculty barbecue and is asked by the host to bring her husband, only he begs off going and when she shows up, someone accosts her as "Wendy," and she has no idea who that is. It turns out Wendy is the name of Michael's former girlfriend, who (supposedly) committed suicide on the eve of their marriage — though of course we suspect Michael murdered her — and Lisa is already the spitting image of her. The resemblance becomes even closer when Michael buys Lisa a frilly off-white dress and tells her to wear it at all times when they're home alone together — and later on Lisa finds a photo of Wendy wearing an identical dress. There's also a sequence in which we see an old wooden trunk in Michael's and Lisa's hallway, and we have no idea what's in there but we know from the sinister music we hear when it's shown on screen that there's something incredibly evil about it . . . Though obviously drawing on the same cliché bank as "Infidelity in Suburbia," Deadly Lessons is a far more powerful and moving piece of work: Michael is a genuinely conflicted character, far more than the cardboard villain of "Infidelity in Suburbia," and as the film progressed I found myself reminded of similar movies in the 1940's in which naïve young women found themselves married to mysterious men with sinister secrets: Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspicion," George Cukor's "Gaslight," Max Ophuls' "Caught." I'm not for a moment suggesting that David DeCoteau is in Hitchcock's, Cukor's or Ophuls' league as a director, but he's working with a script far more sophisticated than the Lifetime norm, with more complex characterizations in both the lead roles, and he's alive to its complexities and fully realizes them on screen despite some bits in the movie that tend towards the usual Lifetime sillinesses. On its own "Deadly Lessons" is a quite impressive movie within the limits of the Lifetime formula, and though showing it right after "Infidelity in Suburbia" made the films look too similar, it also showed how much better DeCoteau, Holdway and Nagaoka did their jobs than David Winning and Christie Will did!