Your Husband Is Not 911

“It’s the Tully’s on 3rd and Union! No, it’s a barber shop. But it looks just like the Tully’s on 3rd and Union!” -Lil Mama Sarah

“Erika Eleniak’s good at looking troubled in lingerie.” -Big Mama Sara

“This is your lesson: never trust anyone.” -stern Girlfriend Stick-Fighting Master

LOOKS JUST LIKE THE LAST POSTER

In classic thriller Fatal Reunion, you often find yourself thinking, GIRL, call the police instead of your husband when some dude is trying to kill you. Jessica, played by the same Baywatch babe as Sara in Second to Die, once again gives off that yogurt-commercial, hot suburban housewife vibe as she sits down at her designer kitchen island with her oversized Dell laptop, lonely R&B music in the background, to check out an old crush on “ClassReunion.com” (which sounds like some kind of MySpace for lonely, middle-aged people who don’t know how to use the Internet). Little did she know, this reunion could have been fatal.

Lifetime movies are classically known for the presence of trifling men who ruin women’s otherwise Appletini, mani-pedi and adorable baby-filled lives. This one, however, has almost no male trifling. While she is initially drawn to creepy old person MySpace because she suspects her husband (who you may recall from such classics as Ice Spiders) of infidelity, she soon learns that he was just hanging out with a super hot French perfume rep getting a two million dollar advertising contract that he used to buy her an expensive hooker necklace. NBD. She hangs out with Marcus, this old crush (also a former Baywatch star) twice, and when he gets fresh the second time she cuts him off.

But then the 3am phone calls start, a rock gets thrown through her window, she is threatened with a crossbow and her dog gets poisoned. And somehow someone is emailing her from a BLOCKED EMAIL ACCOUNT calling her a bitch and a liar in colorful text as the emails just cascade all about her computer screen as if sentient. She tearfully confesses to her husband that she hung out with this guy, with the help of her cranky, ethnic-store owning girlfriend who mysteriously disappears without mention halfway through the film, and her husband immediately puts on the knight-in-shining-armor hat, takes the kids to their aunt’s house, and gets down to business (through all the proper legal channels) trying to get this creeper to leave them alone. The creeper insists that he is not the one bothering them, but chooses a parking garage as the appropriate venue for letting Jessica know. Great move, buster.

Thank God Jessica has a loyal troupe of Sex and the City-style GIRLFRIENDS to help her through these difficult times. They get coffee together! They take Girlfriend Asian Martial Arts stick-fighting from a cranky, disciplined Sensei together (probably at the Y).  So when a mysterious, petite lawyer from Texas shows up to come to her aid, what reason would she have to mistrust her? SPOILER ALERT—it is not until they are battling amongst rows and rows of construction-grade SARAN WRAP that they realize that this lawyer who mysteriously appeared halfway through the film is actually MARCUS’S WIFE who KILLED SOME BITCH IN DALLAS for messing with her man, who is a sleazy slutty dude who came onto these women in the first place. And she has been the one doing the phone-calling and blocked-emailing and dog-killing. Good thing Jessica took Girlfriend Stick-Fighting 101 at the Y, because Dallas certainly wasn’t going to listen to Jessica talk about her babies.

The ending to this gripping thriller is actually pretty lackluster. Marcus dies at the hands of crazytown wife and crazytown wife dies at the hand of Jessica’s Girlfriend Stick-Fighting, Knight in Shining Armor Husband almost dies and says “I love you” as he is loaded into an ambulance. Oh sweet, at the end she still has babies AND a husband. Happily ever after.

Oh, PS, it takes place in Seattle, as indicated by a series of unnecessary establishing shots that are almost as weird as the transitional panning-up shot that often ends a scene—a shot we have dubbed “The Boner Shot.”

This is perhaps the most apt trailer that we at the Critical Sass Film Society have ever seen:

Chauvinism:

1/5

Softcore Porn:

2/5

Feminine Victimization:

5/5

Trifling Man Factor:

1/5! WTF!!!!!!

Sleazy Facial Hair Count:

0!!!! IS THIS REALLY FROM LIFETIME?

You Mean My Harebrained Scheme To Cash In On My Husband’s Life Insurance Policy Is Actually A Tiny Part Of A Larger Harebrained Scheme?!!?!

“That’s complicated. It seems like you may as well go into the stock market at that point.” -Lil Mama Sarah

“Maybe she’s like Doug. Maybe she has ten of that shirt and ten of that skirt!” -Big Mama Sara

“I know how to use the Internet!” -fat friend Cynthia

At first, Second to Die appears to be about a troubled sister, Amber, grappling with her dead, gold-digging sister Sara’s death and her own feelings of inadequacy by piecing together the final months of Sara’s life through her journal. But with more twists, turns and uncomfortable sexual situations than a drive from Portland to Bellingham, we eventually learn that her sister isn’t dead after all (SPOILER ALERT). We never learn whether her sister is part of some insane super-scam or is just an opportunist capitalizing off her victimized, womanly position with the help of a tokenized older, wiser black role model. But either way, she comes out on top using her wiles, perfect blond hair a Baywatch bod and a pair of new-money strappy sandals.

Poor Amber has been left alone in the trailer park this whole time taking care of their ungrateful, lazy alcoholic mother with nothing but her Bohemian artist lover with a questionable goatee, a shitty bar job, and one outfit–white cotton granny panties included. But as Amber pours through Sara’s diary, alienating half-sweet, half-aggro Bohemian Boyfriend and her abusive mother that has grown accustomed to the high-flying lifestyle of a mother-in-law of a wealthy demolitions expert.

Sara’s first husband, Jim, who you may remember from 83 episodes of Dawson’s Creek, has a buttload of money but it comes with a price: his retarded, wheelchair-bound daughter Nikki who he did not inform Sara of before they were married, somehow. When we first meet Sara, who you may recall from Baywatch, she spends most of her days moping, shopping, getting nonchalantly drilled by her stud of a hubby, and wiping shit off Nikki’s face. When her husband’s slick, not-so-dashing (but with a better car) friend Raymond, aka “Snooch,” starts understanding Sara’s love of tennis, vegetables and being listened to, a fatal love triangle is formed. Sara and Snooch plot to kill Jim, turning his own favorite hobby, building bombs in his garage and carrying them around on his dinky little airplane, against him.

There are a few important observations we made here. First of all, no one actually dies in this movie (TWIST). Second, the plethora of different types of softcore porn, from a wild football-sex fuckfest with your con artist faux-husband to a tantric showdown with your bohemian boyfriend with the crunchy perm to the solo, candlelit, sensual bubblebath (for all you dyke housewives).

But third, and most importantly, was how quickly sympathy shifts to a previously disliked female character once she hints at being pro-life. Poor Sara loses her baby that she conceived during a hot night of grunting football sex. This solidifies her determination to kill her husband for his life insurance money when he shows no sympathy toward their unborn, dead fetus, reminding us that women have one, overarching priority: BABIES.

Women’s second priority, of course, going in line with making babies, is men. Saucy men with crunchy perms and goatees that have tantric sex with you in borrowed houses and remind you that your sister is not better than you. For this reason, as soon as Amber finishes reading Sara’s diary, she runs away to New York with her artfaggy boyfriend, leaving her ungrateful mother alone in the trailer with Sara’s diary, who probably dies soon after the movie ends due to falling asleep while smoking—although, in one, poignant moment before she abandons her poor, alcoholic, ungrateful mother, she makes one last caregiving gesture by extinguishing her cigarette before the trailer burns down.

Softcore Porn:

5/5

Feminine Victimization:

4/5

Trifling Man Factor:

5/5

Chauvinism:

4/5

Sleazy Facial Hair Count:

1