Reviewed: Seduced By Lies

Seduced By Lies, starring Josie Davis (one of my favorite Lifetime crazies!) and Marc Menard

Movie description from MyLifetime.com:  A young woman goes back home after selling her internet company. She meets the perfect man and feels that her ex-boyfriend and best friend may be undermining her happiness. It is soon revealed that her new boyfriend has a shady past and isn’t what he seems.

**Contains Spoilers! You’ve been warned!**

The movie opens with a scene of a dark-haired woman leaving a bar and walking across a dark and deserted parking lot. She’s hit by a car, a hit and run, and then the scene immediately goes to a setting Two Weeks Earlier (so says the on-screen text). We begin following our main character, Laura (not the dark-haired woman from the parking lot), who is returning home (via private helicopter and limo) to her family in San Francisco. We are introduced to her sister (I wasn’t sure what her name was until I looked it up on IMDB…Tina? Tito? IMDB says Tia — who knew?) and stepmother, Catherine, who we are immediately supposed to know is wicked (later called “evil”). We also meet Laura and Tia’s father, Charles Colton, who is apparently quite wealthy. You know this because of the many references to his piles of money and because they have this massive dining room table. There’s some conversation during dinner that tells us that Laura has received some help from her father’s connections and influence and she apparently would be a worthless individual without her father’s assistance.

After dinner, Laura drives to see her friend. There’s some scary violin music in the background to tell us that something bad is happening and sure enough, Laura is being followed by someone in a dark hooded sweatshirt. Turns out Laura is going to a bar to see her friend Ava (you may remember her from being run over by a car in the first 3 minutes of the movie. While there, Laura meets Brad Sterling, a young, studly dude who deals in investments and owns a yacht. He buys her a drink, they talk for hours apparently, share a sloppy dance and finally an odd squeaky kiss.

It was during this scene that I decided that Josie Davis must have had a hard time not being the deranged nutjob villian in this movie. She has such unique bizarre mannerisms that you really want to believe she is a lunatic. I honestly thought, up until the end of the movie, that maybe she was crazy in this one too. Seriously though, watch The Perfect Assistant if you want to see her at her maniacal finest. This weekend was apparently Josie Davis Weekend on Lifetime, they had three of her movies showing on Friday night.

Okay anyway. I digress…Laura’s stalker follows her home and sneaks onto her family’s property and watches her undress from the bushes. For such a rich family, they sure didn’t invest in drapes, because she’s changing right out in the open until she hears a twig snap (from outside? Really?) and gets spooked, but not spooked enough to do anything about it. The next morning at breakfast, she sees that she received a vase of flowers from Brad and she plays coy with her sister and stepmother and won’t dish about her date. She goes to Brad’s yacht and there’s a bit of corny dialogue (“Do you send flowers to all the ladies you meet?”) and they kiss once. She needs him to come over to the house to get her dad and stepmother off her back about being set up with her ex-boyfriend Jonathan and show them that she’s doing fine without their help.

As they’re driving up to the house, there are some shots of the driveway from the car. Is it just me who has been ruined by those surprise car accident scenes that are shot from inside the car? I kept expecting them to hit someone or a Mack truck to

come out of nowhere and plow into them. They make it up to the house without incident and are introduced to Laura’s dad and stepmom. Brad makes the connection that Charles knows his uncle Wade and for some reason awkwardly shows Laura’s father a photo on his phone of Brad and Wade playing golf at Pebble Beach. Charles is all “Ummm…okay, thank you for showing me that…?” It made me laugh. Laura’s ex and his father come over to the Colton house and Jonathan (the ex) gets all aggressive with Laura, saying that she barely knows Brad and should be careful. Somehow the Coltons offer to let Brad stay in their guest house instead of him living in his yacht and later that night Laura goes to visit Brad wearing a silky robe. He’s shirtless (obvs) and within seconds they get to work consummating their 1-day-old relationship with a soundtrack of synthesizer and piano.

The next bit is kind of boring but we get to know Ava a little more (she’s recording a demo, blahblahblah), the stepmom seems to be a bit of a creeper, and Brad talks investments with Laura’s dad. Oh yeah and apparently someone has placed a hidden

camera in one of the potted plants in the guest house and has been watching Brad and Laura. One afternoon, Ava comes over to the Colton house and sees Brad “Ghosting” Catherine while he’s teaching her to correctly use fresh herbs (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence). Ava tells Laura, who naturally freaks out and says Ava is just jealous of her fabulous relationship with Brad. Ava says “Be careful, Laura” but of course Laura won’t listen to her because Laura doesn’t listen to anyone.

Laura witnesses a confrontation between Brad and Jonathan at the yacht. Laura takes a photo of them with her phone (because she might need it for proof later in the movie) before Jonathan leaves. Laura asks Brad what that was all about and then asks about what Ava saw between Brad and Catherine which he vehemently denies and calls Ava unstable. Laura goes home and waits for Brad with a bottle of wine but then discovers the not-so-hidden camera. Brad comes home and she confronts him (there’s a lot of confrontation in this movie). Brad surprisingly suggests that they call the police but they don’t (Why would you want to get to the bottom of this??) then says maybe Jonathan was the one who planted the camera (See what I did there? “Planted the camera”? Because it was hidden in the plant.) Laura leaves the guest house and leaves a voicemail for Ava. But sorry, Ava can’t come to the phone right now, she’s about to get murdered. And she does, in the exact same footage from the beginning of the movie.

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Laura is sure Jonathan killed Ava, she makes a big scene, twice. Laura goes to Ava’s house and sees that Ava was researching Brad and had pulled up an article about a missing socialite and yacht (and it’s the same yacht). Brad has some unbelievable story to explain it away when she asks but she goes and searches his yacht anyway and finds a bunch of papers about her family and their wealth. Laura sends a website query form to Human Resources at the Sterling Investment firm (or something. Whatever.) to see if Brad is an employee. Naturally, if you think someone might be up to no good and capable of murder, you’d just send an email, not call them right away. *eyeroll*

Okay, some more unimportant stuff follows. Then there’s a totally ridic scene where someone’s creepin’ on Laura and she runs after them in the woods with a flashlight and then jumps in front of the person’s car. She’s sure it’s Brad but – surprise! – it’s Jonathan. They call the police who confirms he was watching her and had the camera footage on his computer. Laura now seems to be fully trusting of Brad and they get all hot and heavy in the guest house. She’s prepared to go with him to travel the world, presumably in the yacht, but Brad says he has a few things to finish first. That’s never a good sign.

Laura’s on her way to the airport with her family, leaving for vacation, when she gets an email reply from HR saying Brad isn’t an employee at the Sterling Investment place. She does some mobile-Googling and discovers Brad is a dirty rotten liar (which begs the question why she couldn’t find this information previously). She arrives home (with scary, suspenseful music in the background) and tiptoes inside to find Brad breaking into her dad’s safe. She’s hiding, he comes into the hallway with his gun, she dials 911 on this absurd rotary phone in the foyer, and goes back into the room with the safe as Brad gets into it and says “Bingo!” (Really? “Bingo”?) He’s admiring the diamonds from the safe when she pulls the gun on him. They struggle, he confesses all his dirty deedery and then she – I’m not making this up – DRILLS HIS LEG. Yes, she stabs him in the leg with the power drill he used to open the safe. There’s a long drawn-out sequence where she’s hiding, then fighting, then hiding again. Brad killed the butler and falls off the upstairs landing just as the police arrive. However, Brad is now GONE, nowhere to be seen. The police tell Laura he was on Interpol’s most wanted list and Laura’s family assures her that none of this is her fault. Seriously? How is it not her fault, even just a little bit?

The longest movie resolution evah ends with a flash forward six months later. We see Brad at a beach resort, holding one of the diamonds from Charles’s safe and ogling some chick at a bar.

Moral of the story? You aren’t safe anywhere. Brad is still out there, ready to pursue you and destroy your life. And apparently this movie was based on a true story, so the real “Brad” really is out there…RIGHT BEHIND YOU!

Read more of my Lifetime movie and general bad television reviews here!