After "Open Marriage" Lifetime showed something called "Boyfriend Killer," an ambiguous title because at first it wasn't clear whether it would be about a boyfriend who killed his girlfriend or a girlfriend who killed her boyfriend. It turned out to be the latter: it begins with a scene in which Preston Durro (Michael Uribe) is racing down a road on his motorcycle when he's chased and ultimately run off the road by a black SUV. Preston dies and the central characters are actually his parents, Sandra Cruz Durro (Barbie Castro) and her long-estranged husband Charles (Patrick Muldoon, surprisingly hot even though hardly at the league of the two young studs in "Open Marriage"!). The two broke up 10 years previously while Preston was still a boy, largely over Charles' drinking problem and lack of ambition, but Charles agrees to stay behind and support Sandra over her grief at the loss of their son and also help her collect Preston's things. Only they have a major conflict with the boyfriend killer of the title, Krystal Kellers (Kate Mansi, playing the part in the same sort of perky-psycho vein as Rose McGowan did in the 1998 Lifetime movie "Devil in the Flesh" and Jodi Lynn O'Keefe duplicated less effectively in the 2000 sequel), whom we first saw in the middle of a knock-down drag-out argument with her father, oil tycoon Nathan Kellers (Frank Licari). It seems Nathan never liked Preston as a mate for his daughter and had someone quite different in mind for her, Jack Davis (Eric Aragon), a rising young executive at his company, and now that Preston is the victim of an (apparent) accident Nathan thinks it's high time her daughter comes back to earth and marries Jack. There's nothing really wrong with Boyfriend Killer except we've seen it a million times already; the screenwriter is Christine Conradt but this time she seems merely to be following her formulae instead of legitimately extending them the way she did in The Bride He Bought Online (which she directed as well as wrote), and the direction by Alyn Darnay is functional and O.K. but not really inspired. There's nothing really wrong with Boyfriend Killer but there's nothing really right about it, either; Kate Mansi does Perky Psycho 101 well enough, but really, we've seen her likes hundreds of times before on this network, and neither Conradt nor Darnay threw in enough variations on the familiar formulae to get us to care this time.
Review of Boyfriend Killer
