The most telling aspect of last night's Lifetime "premiere" movie, "I Almost Married a Serial Killer," was that the production company that made it for Lifetime distribution had the spookily appropriate name "Formula Features," since the film hewed incredibly closely to the usual Lifetime formulae. At first I had thought the film would be about a woman who was courted by a serial killer and fell in love with him and agreed to marry him with no idea of what he did outside their relationship - I was even thinking of jokes like, "I thought everything was wonderful until I saw what he put on our wedding registry and it was all guns, knives and poisons" - but instead of that set of Lifetime clichés it turned out to be the set of Lifetime clichés in which the heroine, Camille (Krista Allen), barely escapes the clutches of the serial killer in the opening act (for someone who's supposed to be experienced in murder he's certainly bad enough at it the woman has an unbelievably easy time escaping!). She testifies against him at his trial and the judge announces she's going to impose eight consecutive life sentences on him, once for each victim the police have been able to identify and charge him with, with no possibility of parole. Then she receives word from the FBI that he's escaped from prison - like the real escapees from New York's Clinton Correctional Facility Lifetime previously dramatized in the film "New York Prison Break," he did so by sexually seducing a female guard and getting her to help him - and until he's re-arrested the FBI is going to insist that Camille and her daughter go into witness protection and relocate from their original home in Philadelphia to a decidedly fictional community in California.
In the meantime the serial killer Camille almost married, Rafael DuPont (Jeremy John Wells), visits a plastic surgeon and has his appearance so dramatically reconstructed that when he emerges he's played by an entirely different actor - and I found myself so resentful of the "cheat" Formula Features' casting people pulled by casting two separate actors as DuPont pre-op and post-op it was hard for me to enjoy the rest of the movie after absorbing such a preposterous gimmick. What they needed was an actor with the extraordinary talent of Lon Chaney, Sr. in being able to concoct so many makeups for himself he could appear as two dramatically different-looking people in the same movie - but Chaney, Sr. died in 1930 and there haven't been that many actors who've developed that skill since. Another option would have been what writer-director Delmer Daves did in the 1947 Bogart-Bacall vehicle "Dark Passage": show all the scenes of DuPont pre-op from his point of view so we never got to see, except in an insert close-up of a still photo, what he looked like. There isn't anything really wrong with "I Almost Married a Serial Killer" but there isn't much right about it, either. As I said as I started this review, the most remarkable thing about it is that the producers called their studio "Formula Features," thereby making it obvious and proclaiming to the world that they were just going to exploit Lifetime's usual formulae, not try to do anything creative with them!
