Last Saturday, April 30 I watched three, count 'em, three movies in a row on the Lifetime channel, all apparently shown under a rubric called "Don't Mess with Mommy" even though only the first really came under that theme. It was also by far the best of the three: "Break-Up Nightmare." The principals in this one are mother Barbara Light (Jennifer Dorogi) and her teenage daughter Rachel (Celesta DeAstis) — and kudos are definitely in order to casting director Scotty Mullen for finding two actresses who look enough alike that we can believe them as mother and daughter (though Jennifer Dorogi is hot enough we could even more readily believe her as Celesta DeAstis' older sister than as her mom!). In the opening scene Rachel is in her bedroom with her boyfriend Troy (the genuinely hot Mark Grossman — we don't get to see him shirtless, alas, but even covered he's got great pecs!), and of course, this being a Lifetime movie about a teenage girl, her boyfriend wants to have sex with her but she's holding him off. She does yield to his entreaties to let him take naked pictures of her, saying that he'll be going off to college (probably on an athletic scholarship because he doesn't seem like the brightest bulb in the chandelier) and wants her on his phone to remind himself of her and help him fend off the college girls that will be after him. Then there's a title reading "Two Weeks Later" (something of a pleasant surprise since Lifetime movies generally jump months or even years between these prologues and the main body of the films), and two weeks later Troy has dumped Rachel and is looking for female companionship that will be more, shall we say, accommodating. He's also got his revenge against Rachel by posting her photos to a so-called "revenge porn" site whose proprietor, Ashton Banks (Daron McFarland), has an attitude towards women that makes Donald Trump's look like a model of sensitivity by comparison. The motto of his site is "Squirt 'Em and Hurt 'Em," and it's clear from the text on his home page that it's based on the idea that if a woman turns down a man for sex, she's made herself fair game for any sort of humiliation he cares to dish out. Rachel's pics end up on this site and go viral, and in the little town of "Redford" (pop. 2,340) in which this is taking place, everyone, it seems, recognizes her.
"Break-Up Nightmare" has a couple of typical flaws for a Lifetime movie: the almost supernatural power of the villain and a "surprise" twist that's considerably less surprising than the writer thought it was. But the film is also an engagingly tense thriller, well directed by Quod (whose avoidance of flanging and other fancy music-video effects seemed all the more welcome compared to the way the next two films on Lifetime's program were directed) and convincingly acted all the way around. This isn't a great movie but it's a reasonably convincing thriller that may push credibility but doesn't go whole-hog into crazy or silly plotting, and the ending is a logical summing-up of what's gone before instead of the nihilistic wrap-ups of Lifetime's other two films the same night, "Seduced" and "Bad Behavior."
