INTO THE ARMS OF DANGER: DTMWaGL #33
Hello again! Have you noticed recurring themes in these Lifetime movies I write about? Yeah, me too. I try pretty hard to find movies that aren’t the same old same old, which is why I don’t do many of the “woman meets man and thinks he’s great, but he turns out to be Bad” ones. But still, there are a lot of things that are Deadly, and a lot of things that are Wrong, and while the title is a new format, I realized halfway through that oh, no, this is another woman-held-captive story, like His Perfect Obsession or The Captive Nanny or Trapped Model or uhhh there was another one I think? Oh my god. KEPT WOMAN. Jesus. Okay. But! There’s an important distinction here, which is: this movie has an honest-to-god Oscar nominee in it. INTO THE ARMS OF DANGER stars Cathy Moriarty, from Raging Bull. That was her first movie! This is her 71st. I haven’t seen Raging Bull, of course, as I’ve never seen a real movie, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a decline. (Content warnings for kidnapping, a car crash, a brief threat of sexual violence, and an incest vibe, also this is a long one, click the title up top if you’re reading this in your email.)
The film opens with a brief scene of a young woman running through the woods on an injured leg, before being tackled by some guy and then obliterated by the title screen, which, see:
We then immediately move to a teen party and are introduced to our protagonist, Jenny, and her best friend Nicole, who seems like she’ll be relevant throughout the movie but absolutely is not. Also, Jenny looks so similar to the girl in the first scene that I spent the entire length of the movie thinking that she was the girl in the first scene, and this was a “one week earlier, before she had run INTO THE ARMS OF DANGER” scene, and did not realize until I sat down to write this that she was not the same girl. Jenny and Nicole talk about how great it is that high school is over, and soon they’ll be roommates at college, until a guy wearing multiple necklaces and an elaborate leather jacket bumps into Jenny and spills her drink. He offers to get her a new drink, and Nicole pointedly says that since they don’t know him, she will be getting a new drink, and that qualifies this Lifetime movie as educational programming. Nicole disappears into a black hole for the rest of the movie, so Jenny introduces himself to the necklaces and the leather jacket and the person wearing them, whose name is Drake. Jenny and Drake chat, and when he says her parents must be proud of the good college she got into, she says that actually her dad died a year ago. “Sorry but hey do you want to come see my band tomorrow?” Drake replies, and hands her a flyer. This is how I should be promoting my newsletter, I get it now. Also, Drake and the Mutorcs (???) will be supported by Suffrajetts, Gimp City (not great), and Pope Goat VII. I’m coming early to see Pope Goat VII and then skipping out on everybody else, sorryyyy.
At this point, Jenny realizes she’s out past her curfew and leaves Drake by the pool, but her car won’t start, so she calls her mom. While Jenny’s mom Laura scolds her for being alive, Drake wanders up and asks if he can help. Jenny hangs up on her mom and lets Drake poke around under the hood. He gets it going just as Laura pulls up to retrieve her daughter, and attempts to introduce himself, but Laura basically tells him to fuck off. Drake is like, “haha well okay I fixed your daughter’s car so she can get home safe, but bye, I guess??” When Jenny and her mom get home, they argue about how overprotective Laura is, and how weird it was that she treated Drake like a rapist when all he did was fix her car, and Laura yells that she’s just trying to keep her daughter safe. I don’t know if Jenny’s dad died from cancer, or a car crash, or spontaneous combustion, or simply becoming unbound from Earth’s gravitational pull and floating into space, but he’s dead, and Jenny’s mom needs to protect her.
Well, Jenny’s mom does need to protect her, but she also needs to go to a conference for sellers of medical equipment, so that’s what she does the next morning. I salute this movie for giving a normal woman a normal job. She isn’t an architect or an interior designer or a fashion blogger; she sells ventilators. Laura frets about leaving Jenny alone, and frets even harder when she gets to her hotel and calls Jenny, who is driving two hours to see Drake’s band play. “Just because you stopped having a life when Dad died doesn’t mean I have to,” Jenny snaps at her mom, in a very weirdly accented series of words, and then whoops she sees some junk in the road and swerves into a pole. She’s basically fine, but her car won’t start and she hit her head on the steering wheel, and her mom tells her to tell her where she is so she can call 911 for her. What? Why? That is not how 911 works at all, it’s not calling in sick to third grade. Jenny says no, she’ll call 911 herself, and she does, but the dispatcher warns her it might be a little while. Jenny calls her mom back to talk while she waits for the ambulance, but it ends up not taking long at all, and she hangs up when she sees the approaching flashing lights. Two EMTs emerge from the ambulance, and one examines Jenny for a concussion while the other pokes through her car. Those paramedics have sticky fingers. It doesn’t matter though, because the concussion guy ends up stabbing Jenny with a sedative and strapping her to a gurney in the back of the ambulance. This is actually the only way to see Pope Goat VII. It’s a whole complicated experience.
When Jenny wakes up, she’s surrounded by porcelain dolls, and she has a shock collar on her ankle. She must have slept right through Pope Goat VII. Or maybe this is Pope Goat VII? One of the EMTs is sitting on the end of her twin bed, and he tells her that she’s home now, Jenny, and also that his name is Clyde, not that she asked. It’s so gauche to not inquire about the name of your kidnapper immediately upon regaining consciousness. Jenny asks why they brought her to this weird doll room instead of to the hospital, and Clyde replies that buying that ambulance at auction was the best thing Daddy ever did before he died. You should not be allowed to simply buy an ambulance. Libertarians have gone too far. Jenny jumps up and bangs on the window, but there’s no one around to hear her, and Clyde buzzes her shock anklet and hands her a dress. It’s time to go meet Momma!
Meanwhile, Jenny’s actual momma has arrived at the hospital nearest to where her daughter crashed, and she harangues an EMT who absolutely does not know where Jenny is. He tells Laura that they went to the scene, and there was no girl, no car, certainly no best friend Nicole, he doesn’t know what to tell her. “How about you tell me where the hell my daughter is!” she yells, because yelling makes people remember things.
Jenny, now dressed in the plain black button-up dress Clyde gave her, is shepherded downstairs to meet Momma and also the other EMT, who is Clyde’s brother Guy. Guy n’ Clyde, kidnappin’ gals all over this here highway. Guy nervously tells Jenny that she’ll be all right if she just does what they tell her to. Momma, upon seeing Jenny, gasps, “oh, Lizzy, my dear sweet girl, you’re finally home!” Jenny absolutely does not understand why Academy Award nominee Cathy Moriarty is calling her Lizzy, and grabs a framed family photo off the wall to point at this presumed Lizzy and to herself, who is, as you can see, not Lizzy. Momma concedes that her hair is different, but that’s fine, she can fix it. “You’re insane, all of you,” says Jenny, and Momma slaps her because it is not insane to want to keep your family safe. Oh, do you see? Just like her real mom wants to keep her safe? Parallels. Mm.
Laura visits the local sheriff, who, you will be surprised to learn, absolutely does not give a shit about her missing child. She probably ran away, who cares, 18-year-old girls grow on trees.
At dinner, Momma and her boys say grace before tucking into their fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Jenny, determined to ruin this nice home-cooked meal, tells Momma that someone will come looking for her, and then grabs a knife. Nobody is impressed, and Momma breezily says that this is how Lizzy always acts when she first comes home. Oofa doofa! Jenny can’t figure out how to unlock any of the doors, and she can’t figure out how to stab her way out, which seems like it would be so easy, and Momma just takes the knife away from her. After Clyde locks Jenny in her room for the night, she finds a diary under the bed because this is not just a Lifetime movie, it is a survival horror video game. The diary, like all fictional diaries and zero nonfictional ones, has a coherent plot: it chronicles Lizzy’s love for a boy named Tommy, and Momma’s efforts to keep them apart. That’s all the backstory I needed, I’m satisfied.
The next morning, Jenny makes another escape attempt by braining Clyde with a cast-iron pan and grabbing his keys, but she can’t figure out which key she puts in the truck ignition to make the truck go. This is the point at which this movie becomes anti-car propaganda; there is not a single vehicle in this movie that always starts when it needs to, so why even bother having them? If there was a bus that went past Momma’s house, Jenny would have been rescued yesterday. She tries to run through the woods, past several bear traps, but is stopped by the electric fence attached to her shock anklet. Guy, the nice kidnapper, scoops Jenny up and brings her back to the house and sedates her after Clyde, the mean kidnapper, decides she’s learned her lesson. She wakes up chained to the bed with Clyde looming over her, telling her to not do anything stupid like that again. Not for his sake, but for Momma’s. “What, you thought you were the first Lizzy we brought home?” I mean, no, but also I couldn’t tell this Lizzy apart from the other Lizzy, or from the real Lizzy, if you put a shock collar on my ankle and a bear trap on my foot.
After Clyde unlocks her, Jenny wanders around the house dusting knickknacks and attempting to learn how to use the ham radio police scanner deal, but that doesn’t work any better than the knife waving did. I am not trying to cast aspersions, but this girl is notably terrible at escaping. She ends up pumping Guy for information about his sister instead, and he tells her that Lizzy was just gone one day. He assumes she ran off with Tommy, but something inside Momma snapped, and she just kept calling for Lizzy. So they brought her a Lizzy. The first one didn’t quite take, so they brought her another one, which is Jenny. Guy pleads with Jenny to behave herself, because when Momma is upset with you, she sends you to the basement, with the rats and the “crawly things.” At this point, Momma interrupts their little meeting of the minds, but not before Jenny grabs a seam ripper out of a sewing kit.
While her daughter fails at escaping her kidnappers, Laura busies herself by getting pissy at Drake for no real reason. He shows up at her house because Jenny didn’t come to his show, so he figured her mom talked her out of driving out to see him, but he didn’t know Jenny was missing missing. “So you’re not here to clear your name? Or your conscience?” asks Laura. Laura, chill out! He’s a nice boy with a weird band name and several necklaces! He offers to help look for Jenny, and the two of them drive around the area handing out flyers. I’m sure Nicole was just really busy today. She has this summer job? So.
Jenny is ineffectually poking at her anklet with the seam ripper when Clyde brings her some fresh laundry and drawls that it would really be easier for her if she went along. He adds to his point by putting his hand on her thigh, and Jenny asks if that’s why Lizzy ran away, because Clyde touched her like that. I repeat: oofa doofa. Clyde doesn’t answer directly, but goes off about how Lizzy abandoned her family, and it made Momma “dark.” Then one day they were in town and saw a skinny brunette and Momma said, “that’s Lizzy!” and, well, the rest is history.
In the course of her canvassing, Laura happens upon the very house where her daughter is being held captive, so the movie is over now, let’s go home. No, sorry, although Jenny sees her mom through a window, she can’t get her attention before Clyde grabs her and holds a knife to her throat, the movie goes on. Momma answers the door, scissors in hand, and tells Laura that no, she hasn’t seen her daughter. She keeps her own kids on a short leash, maybe Laura could try that. Momma’s two surviving children do seem very devoted to her. She must be doing something right. Laura asks her if any of her neighbors have an ambulance, since Jenny definitely got in an ambulance before she disappeared, and Momma says no, of course not, you can’t just buy an ambulance at auction, that would be absurd. Laura leaves, and Momma goes inside and writes out a message for Jenny to read into a little tape recorder. Then they go find a pay phone and play Jenny’s message, about how she’s fine and she doesn’t want to be found, but she throws in an ad-libbed “I love you Mom, tell Dad I said hi,” at the end. Laura is equally as surprised by the fact that her daughter found a pay phone to call from as she is by the reference to Jenny’s dead father.
Laura takes the voicemail (what would they have done if she’d picked up the phone and tried to talk to her daughter? unclear) to the sheriff and he’s like, “oh my god lady I do not know how much clearer I can be that I do not care.” The thing about her dad is probably not code, like Laura thinks it is, but rather “guilt or drugs.” Here’s what he does care about: he’s been getting reports that Laura is trespassing, with her whole door-knocking, flyering thing she’s doing. People around here like two related things: 1. privacy, and 2. guns. He’s just concerned for her safety. Laura snaps at him that he should put some of that concern toward finding Jenny. At home, she plays the for Drake, who agrees it’s weird and asks for a copy.
That night, in Lizzy mode, Jenny brushes Momma’s hair, very normal, and tells her she’s sorry about the night they fought, before she left. Momma is sorry too! She would never hurt Lizzy on purpose but she just lost her temper. I think the movie wants me to think that Lizzy might have actually just run away with her boyfriend? But the IMDb description for this movie is “Two paramedics arrive at the site of a car accident to transport an injured teenage girl to the hospital. However, instead of taking her to the hospital, the strangers bring her to a home of a woman whose daughter just died.” So the suspense is minimal.
Back at home, Laura puts “missing teens southern ca” into the fake-Google machine, and “Giggo search” returns a result for a teen named Rebecca Miller. She looks very much like Jenny, and she disappeared in the same area eighteen months ago. Laura marches back to the sheriff because she just loves negging, I guess? He tells her that yeah, they looked into that girl, but she was traveling with her boyfriend and only a real dope wouldn’t be able to see they just ran away. The sheriff’s whole attitude is that literally every teen hates their parents and can’t wait to get away and never speak to them again on penalty of torture, and that’s why the social fabric of this country is crumbling into dust. Laura snaps at him that he’s 0 for 2, if he was keeping score.
Drake, meanwhile, is listening very hard to the message Jenny left for her mom. He really has to concentrate to hear it over the jingling of his necklaces, but he hears…something. Actually, you know what, here’s the hardest I’ve laughed at a Lifetime movie the whole time I’ve been doing this newsletter:
That being a train notwithstanding, Jenny is still hanging out at this house with people who kidnapped her and forced her to pretend she’s a girl named Lizzy. She calls Guy, the nice son who seems to feel kind of bad about this whole thing, into her room to help her with a stuck zipper on her dress. But the zipper thing is just a clever ruse to seduce him with the classic line, “I know you know I’m not really your sister, who either ran away or is dead, depending on which version you want to believe right now, so it’s okay if we smooch and also run away together, away from the mother who has you completely under her control.” This, shockingly, doesn’t work, but Jenny just kisses him anyway, full steam ahead with the seduction escape plan, and at this point Momma walks past Jenny’s room and sees them in a clinch. “DEFILER!” she shrieks, and drags Guy out by his hair, adding that this is exactly why she got rid of his father. Oof, poor Lizzy. Momma takes Guy outside and throws open the door to the basement, telling him he can live down there with the animals, if that’s how he wants to act. I wonder if there is a possum in the basement. Or a raccoon! I could make friends down there. She ends up not putting him in the basement, so…crisis averted.
Drake, having determined that that’s a train, pulls up to a dusty train track near where Jenny went missing. He wanders around and spots Momma’s house, which really could stand to be more isolated. Creeping toward the house, Drake sees the ambulance parked on the side of the house, and when he peeks inside, there’s the show flyer he gave Jenny. And that was his only flyer, so this must be where Jenny is. When Guy wanders through the yard looking for his brother, Drake whacks him with a 2x4 and takes his keys, which he uses to let himself inside the house. Jenny drops her laundry basket when she sees him, probably thinking, “wow, incredible, this guy I met literally one time at a party after he spilled a drink on me has come to rescue me, rather than my mother or my best friend or the police,” and hugs him. Drake pulls Jenny toward the door, but she points out her shock anklet, and he can’t find the right key for it before Clyde saunters into the living room. They should have called this Into the Arms of Not Being Able to Find The Right Keys. Drake hides, and Jenny tries to pawn Clyde off, but Guy comes running up to the house yelling about being attacked. Drake and Jenny make a break for it, but before they get to his car, Drake gets his foot caught in a bear trap, making “protection from bear traps” another thing I have googled for this newsletter. (Some kinds of medieval greaves, perhaps, according to “Alisdair Gaston, Royal Pretender, Amateur Anchorite, Samurai Episcopalian,” and owner of one point four million content views on Quora, the world’s most unfun website.) He gives Jenny his car keys and tells her to run, and then attracts Clyde’s attention by screaming like a girl, very killdeer move here, but an injured Drake’s 2x4 is no match for a big rock Clyde picks up, and that’s it for Drake. That’s also it for Jenny’s escape attempt, because guess what? Drake’s car doesn’t start, even though she found the right key and everything, because apparently being left in the sun for like fifteen minutes was too much for his late-model truck. Guy finds Jenny and breaks the car window with another big rock, this is big rock city, big rock candy mountain over here, and drags her out. Drake should have timed this escape for the train going by so they wouldn’t have to rely on a car starting.
Meanwhile! Jenny’s mom Laura has tracked down the mother of the other missing girl, Rebecca Miller. Amy, Rebecca’s mom, shows her a map of where her daughter made a 911 call that was the last anyone heard from her, and it’s where Jenny was last seen too. Amy cries that the police just kept saying “troubled home,” like what home isn’t troubled, and she is acting in a movie that’s much better and sadder than this one. Kudos to you, Dru Mouser, I sincerely wish you the best. She presses a little revolver into Laura’s hands, telling her that she bought it to use on the person who took Becca, but now she just needs Laura to take it so she doesn’t use it on herself. Jesus christ!
This is a very busy day, as Clyde carries a shrieking Jenny back to the house. Momma is furious with her for lying to her face, saying she’d changed. Now she realizes she’s not even Lizzy. So, it’s basement time for Jenny! Momma hucks her down there and slams the door behind her, telling her sons to go find Lizzy like they were supposed to. She stalks off and Jenny pleads with Guy through the door, telling him that he knows he’s trying to help Momma but she’s sick and needs more help than he can give her. I’d say she might need a new agent, but you know what, she’s a working actress at 60, and that’s great, and I’m happy for her. Guy miserably replies that he can’t abandon his family like Lizzy did, because family is forever. Jenny tells him to go ask Clyde what happened to Lizzy, and he wanders away, leaving her to explore the basement. It smells bad but otherwise it looks like a normal junky basement. The two houses I lived in before this one had way worse basements, they both had dirt floors and one of them had a possum in it. The source of the bad smell in the basement turns out to be much worse than a possum friend, though: it’s Lizzy’s dead body stuffed in a trunk. What? She’s dead?? I thought she ran away! Oh I have been deceived.
Clyde arrives back home from dumping Drake’s car somewhere, and Momma tells him to deal with that harlot in the basement. Older women talking about teenage girls in movies have never moved past the mom in Carrie and the grandma in Flowers in the Attic, and we must honor this tradition. After Clyde dispatches Jenny, he can go find a new Lizzy, and then they’ll all be happy again.
He won’t have to wait long to find a new Lizzy, because Laura has come up with a plan! She drives out to where her daughter crashed her car, pulls over, and calls 911 pretending to be a scared 18-year-old girl who had an accident. “I’m white, and I have long straight brown hair, and I’m thin, with kind of a round face, and I crashed my car,” she tells the dispatcher. The dispatcher sends out a call over the scanner, and Guy and Clyde get dressed in their EMT outfits to go scoop her up. On the drive over, Guy asks Clyde what really happened to Lizzy, and Clyde snaps that she just slipped away one night, you remember how willful she was. Willful women love to slip. As they approach the supposed accident site, Laura hides and watches them through binoculars. This is a good plan, Laura! Good job. The brothers decide that the real EMTs must have beaten them to the accident, and Clyde suggests maybe going to the local college again. Guy has a really radical idea: maybe we just, stop kidnapping teenagers? No, terrible idea, it would make Momma sad, never mind. They get back in the ambulance and head home, followed at a sneaky distance by Laura.
Laura pulls up to the house and texts the sheriff that she found the ambulance that abducted her daughter. Then, within thirty seconds, she manages to trap Clyde in a barn and hold Guy at gunpoint while asking where her daughter is. Jenny runs up the basement stairs holding a locket that she took off Lizzy’s decayed corpse, brandishing it at Guy through the storm door, telling him that Lizzy is where Momma left her. Then he’s advanced upon by a third woman, as Momma rushes outside and tells him not to listen, but Guy runs down the stairs, letting Jenny out as he goes. This is just a lot for Guy the nice kidnapper to deal with! It’s absolute chaos here at Kidnapper Manor, god I wish I had learned these people’s last name at some point, as Clyde escapes the barn and knocks Laura down and chokes her. Jenny runs inside and grabs her shock collar (I thought she was still wearing it?? I don’t know, maybe she finally figured out how keys work) and its controller, wraps it around Clyde’s neck, turns it on high, and throws the controller into the bushes. Haha hell yeah.
Guy emerges from the basement and stands between Momma, who grabbed Laura’s gun when Clyde knocked her over, and Jenny and Laura. He is furious with Momma, telling her that she lied, Lizzy is down there, with the crawly things. Again, it is a regular basement. It is not full of lizards. It is not full of lizards. But he’s very upset; he thought his sister was alive because he didn’t read the description of the movie he’s in. Momma pleads with him that it was an accident, Lizzy wanted to leave and they argued and she pushed her and Lizzy hit her head on the banister and died. “You killed Lizzy!” Guy yells and grabs his mother by the throat, as the paunchy and useless sheriff pulls into the driveway. “They’re around back!” Laura says to him. “Who is?” asks the sheriff, incompetent to the very end. ACAB but also ACAU. ACAI. Wait that’s a berry. Anyway, as the sheriff is useless, he did not arrive in time to break up Guy and Momma, and Momma has shot her son in the chest and killed him. The sheriff loads Momma into a cruiser and tells Jenny and Laura he’ll call an ambulance to get them checked out. “Lol, fuck off, oh my god” they reply. Is Clyde also getting arrested? Yeah probably. I didn’t see it and I don’t feel like going back to check.
We watch Jenny and her “best” “friend” Nicole pack up Nicole’s car and head off to college. Even though Nicole did not lift a FINGER to help find her friend, and even though she let some guy they met one! time! literally die for her, they’re still roomies. Friends till the end. Good luck at school Jenny, make some new friends.
The movie ends with a bleak vision of Momma being held in a mental health prison facility thing, where she treats the nurse who gives her her meds like she’s her sweet long-lost daughter Lizzy. She’s gonna fix her a special meal! Ominous music swells, and I guess Cathy Moriarty is gonna murder the nurse now. Take your work where you can get it. The end!