NIGHTMARE PTA MOMS: DTMWaGL #49

Ah shoot, @theroyalkitten is taken on Instagram

Hello friends! I am here to tell you about a movie called NIGHTMARE PTA MOMS. But the thing is, there’s only one NIGHTMARE PTA MOM in the whole movie. Others are perhaps suboptimal PTA moms, and there’s one PTA dad who seems very nice, but there is only the one nightmare. That’s okay though, IMDb has another title for it, you can also call it KILLER AT THE SCHOOL GATES but hey wait, this school doesn’t have gates. It is a normal school. It is not Madeline’s school, with twelve little girls in two straight lines. Just, normal. Bad titles. Well, that’s fine. Everyone involved is doing their best. (Content warnings for murder, discussion of suicide, and mystifyingly bad rice krispie treats.)

A woman takes a shower in slow-motion black and white and then complains to her husband Bill that the hot water is running out, can he check the water heater? Yes. He’ll check the water heater if it’s the last thing he ever does, which it is, as his wife pushes him down the basement stairs. The closed captions identify this woman as “Gail”, which is incorrect for two reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

As the film shifts into color, we meet the actual protagonist of this movie. Not the first woman. Whose name is: Gail. Except the closed captions and IMDb spell it “Gail” while the actual end credits and on-screen text spell it “Gayle.” Nightmare moms, women who may or may not be named “Gail,” this movie is a sinister trap where nothing is what it seems. Gayle (I guess!!) Gardner, her husband Rick, and their daughter Chloe are moving into their new house in what they call “Bellhaven Cliffs” but which is actually, in keeping with this whole deal, Clearwater, Florida. That’s fine. The house is a gorgeous neoclassical affair with a butcher block countertop and huge windows everywhere, but Gayle is having a hard time appreciating it because she’s worried about starting over and rebuilding her client base from scratch. Client base? Is she a lawyer or a real estate agent or a therap — oh, she’s a baker. Okay. Rick reassures her that Gayle’s Goodies is going to take off here just like it did back wherever they came from, I have no idea where that is. Chloe, being in seventh grade, is also not thrilled about the move, but her mom explains to her that her dad had the opportunity to be a regional manager of a clothing chain and that’s the kind of thing you just can’t pass up. Someday she’ll understand the dizzying heights that regional managing can take you to.

Gayle takes Chloe to her first day at her new (top-rated, public) school and introduces herself to two women running a bake sale in the library. She’s a baker! She’d love to help! A woman wearing a very fashion-y outfit slinks out of the stacks and accosts Gayle: hello, you’re a baker? You simply must join the PTA. Gayle is momentarily flummoxed but agrees to give it a shot. This bewilderingly sleek woman, Vanessa Van De Berg, hands Gayle a rice krispie treat and purrs, “Welcome to the PTA.” In the car, Gayle tries the marshmallow square and puts it down after one bite because it is absolutely terrible.

Chloe tries to make friends in the girls’ bathroom and is completely ignored by her first prospect. Another girl informs her that that’s “mopey Marcy, she’s been like that since her mom died.” “Oh!” Chloe replies, in exactly the tone that you, a normal person, would say “what the fuck??” in reply to that sentence. This horrible child, who turns out to be Vanessa’s daughter Serena, compliments Chloe’s shoes, and Chloe eagerly says that her dad is a regional manager for JackieZ’s, and she gets a discount there. Cool!

Gayle arrives at her first PTA meeting with a tray of homemade treats and presents them to Vanessa, who hates them. And when I say “PTA meeting,” please do not think “a bunch of people sitting around a table in the library.” No, this is a whole thing, in the auditorium, with Vanessa, PTA president, at a podium with her name projected behind her on the wall. “Hello ladies, and Frank,” Vanessa greets them. Frank, the aforementioned PTA dad who seems very nice, waves. A woman named Sunny talks about fundraisers and a woman named Dinah talks about taking over the yearbook after the untimely death of Lexie Wilson, who we all miss very much. Does?? the PTA??? make the yearbook???? I can see why they would for like, an elementary school, but by the time I was in junior high the kids did the yearbook. Well, anyway, Vanessa introduces Gayle, who introduces herself and hands out business cards for Gayle’s Goodies as Vanessa cringes in an upper-class way, but joke’s on Vanessa, everyone ate Gayle’s cookies and nobody touched Vanessa’s disgusting marshmallow guys. After the meeting, Gayle chats with Sunny and Dinah, and Sunny accidentally invites her to a party at Vanessa’s on Saturday. Vanessa repays Sunny for this by standing in the way of her car and hissing something about remembering who the PTA president is. It’s Vanessa! It’s Vanessa. Hisssssssssssss.

Chloe is holding down the Gardner fort alone when her mom gets home, and Gayle calls Rick over and over but he doesn’t pick up. When he finally gets back from work, he knows what she’s thinking, but his phone died, and she has to trust him. Apparently Rick got real flirty with someone over text a while back and Gayle isn’t over it yet. Okay, yes, Rick’s employee Sissy was flirting with him, but it’s nothing.

Speaking of Rick and Sissy and JackieZ’s, Chloe takes Serena and her minions Becca and Haley shopping there. Sissy tells Chloe how cool her dad is while Serena steals a pair of sunglasses, and Chloe is fairly dismayed by this whole situation. She does have that sweet sweet discount card though, which Sissy lets her use for her friends’ stuff too, and this is a lot about a discount card, and it doesn’t really come back around. Chloe’s friends are trash jerks and Sissy rats them out to Chloe’s dad. That’s the whole thing.

It’s Saturday, so Gayle and Rick show up at Vanessa’s for the party with a bottle of merlot. Except actually this party isn’t for PTA parents, it’s for PTA moms only, so Rick peaces out. So why is this a moms-only party? Because it isn’t a regular party, it’s a horny party. Gayle barely has any time to snoop around (this place has stairs to the basement! Vanessa is a widow! et cetera!) before a fake-cop stripper shows up. So titillating, living in a police state. Everyone stumbles out after the debauchery, Vanessa warning them not to tell anybody, especially their husbands, about what really goes on at these parties. Gayle, true to her word, informs Rick that they played charades, and she is pretty drunk because she was playing charades with strangers and she needed to be loose. I mean, yeah. Mommy needs her charade juice.

The next time Gayle picks up Chloe at school (so sad that this school can’t afford buses), she witnesses Chloe totally blow off that Marcy girl who was trying to say hi. Chloe blithely informs her mom that Marcy is a total weirdo since her mom died, because it takes approximately six days to form a new personality, and Gayle makes a big deal about going to say hi to Marcy and her dad. GOD, Mom, your human compassion is so EMBARRASSING I could DIE just like MARCY’S MOM.

Chloe’s friends are little rat thieves but I guess they’re still allowed over to hang out at the in-ground pool. Chloe talks to them like she’s a mid-level HR person and we learn that Becca’s dad is a doctor. What kind? “Medical doctor?” Okay, thank you. Vanessa comes over to pick up her daughter and just lets herself in, startling Gayle in the kitchen. She’s baking a cake for Frank, and “Frank does love his sweets,” Vanessa sneers. All of Vanessa’s lines are sneered, but boy does she hate that this man likes a treat. Gayle asks her to take her shoes off in the house, because Rick is a germ freak, but also, who wants to wear shoes in the house? Why! Shoes are for dirt. Dirt is for outside. Vanessa takes off her shoes but also sneakily turns up the oven temperature to 450, much too high for a cake. Gayle gives Vanessa a tour of the house so that Vanessa can have an opinion on the firmness of Gayle’s mattress and then dramatically flop into a wingback chair and announce that the only crime in this very safe neighborhood is adultery. Gayle offers that adultery is not, actually, illegal, and Vanessa is like, well. Then the cake timer dings and the cake is all jacked up and the scene ends so abruptly that I briefly wondered if they cut out a sex scene or something. Probably not, that would be adultery, which is illegal, maybe??

Gayle decides that Vanessa is simply too weird and must be snooped on, so she arranges to meet up with Marcy and Marcy’s dad, Jack, who it turns out is the widower of the woman who actually won the last election for PTA president, right before she died in an apparent suicide. Weird, Lexie had never seemed suicidal. Plus she’d just gotten a big promotion! No one who gets a promotion could be sad. Gayle also pumps Sunny for information at a bake sale, and Sunny adds “Lexie was probably having an affair with Vanessa’s husband” to the mix. But also, you know, Lexie had secretly been taking antidepressants for years. In bed that night, Gayle fills Rick in on all the gossip and he’s like, “this is a lot of gossip,” and she’s like, “this isn’t gossip.” Mm.

Suddenly it is Halloween! Gayle and Rick are chaperoning the Halloween festival, dressed as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, in the kind of costumes you only see in real life on people who have full access to the Spirit Halloween archives. Chloe is dressed like a cat, in a normal way, and she is hugely embarrassed by her parents hamming it up. “The royal kitten is displeased!” her father booms, and I laugh, it’s a funny line. Vanessa came as Maleficent, and her hobbies include: frightening children. Sunny and her husband are vampires or some bullshit, and she tells Gayle that someone keyed the shit out of her car. No time to dwell on that though, it’s time for the “parent costume contest” at this event for children, which is a very big deal. The winner is determined by applause, and the applause loves Gayle a little more than it loves Vanessa. Vanessa and her daughter Serena are pissed off and horrified at this turn of events, which could not possibly be less consequential in this one life they each have to live.

There’s an afterparty at Vanessa’s, and she is being shitty or horny or both to literally everyone she sees. Rick compliments her costume and she replies that it’s fine she didn’t win actually, she can live without a gift card. He and Gayle casually grill Vanessa about her dead husband, just like, normal Halloween party behavior, and she purrs that it was so sad, he was not well for some time, but the end came sooner than expected. That is, certainly, one way to describe pushing your husband down the stairs after he possibly cheated on you. Meanwhile, upstairs, Chloe is hanging out with Serena and her hangers-on, and she asks Serena if she bought those sunglasses or what, and Serena is appalled at the implication. She also declares that they can’t go trick-or-treating because candy gives you pimples. I can excuse thievery, but I draw the line at refusing free candy.

After the party, Gayle and Rick gossip about Vanessa some more, and how weird it is that she is constantly needling them and trying to get them to fight. Also, Gayle thinks Vanessa has a drinking problem, because she had TWO scotches. Plus she clearly has issues, she had a stripper at a PTA party! Rick is annoyed that Gayle lied about the stripper, but in a way hanging out with a stripper is like playing charades, because we are all in this charade called life.

Oh, time for another PTA meeting with shockingly high production values. Gayle proposes installing security cameras, in light of Sunny’s car getting keyed. Vanessa would rather not, and when they have a recess, she hides in the bathroom to eavesdrop on Sunny warning Gayle that Vanessa won’t allow cameras. Anyway, she knows who keyed her car and she isn’t going to report it. Oh but cops love receiving reports of property damage and then doing nothing about it, you’re denying a cop a treat!

Vanessa has to retaliate somehow, and her plan is: going to the Wet Seal-ish store where Rick works and forcing him to help her try on a yoga outfit? And grabbing his phone out of his pocket and leaving it in the dressing room? A very “well,,,,, okay?” kind of revenge plan.

While her mom is unsuccessfully seducing a regional manager of a Charlotte Russe, Serena is carving her many initials into a bench at school. When it’s Chloe’s turn to carve her two measly initials, she spits that actually she doesn’t commit vandalism, and she doesn’t steal. Serena has the receipt for those sunglasses, and she’d be careful with those accusations. “Ooh, I’m scared,” Chloe replies, and stalks off.

Rick is late coming home again, and when he finally gets home he tells Gayle he can’t find his phone anywhere. Oh, Gayle already knows where his phone is, because Sissy the clerk heard it ringing in the dressing room and called her. Sissy, huh? Is she cute? Is Sissy cute, answer the question, Rick. Rick says he’s not having an affair with his 25-year-old clerk and Gayle is like, oh, was that the question I was asking? Tense! All this marital tension and possible infidelity, if you were wondering, has absolutely zero payoff. I’m telling you this now so you don’t get invested in Rick and Gayle’s marital foundation.

Gayle runs into Vanessa outside the school, and Vanessa is thrilled to show off her new yoga outfit. She purrs that Rick was so helpful picking it out. So Gayle marches over to JackieZ’s and buys herself the exact same outfit, because something about seeing this monochrome floral yoga outfit makes women hatch absolutely inscrutable plans. A very specific Stendhal syndrome. When Rick gets home, Gayle asks him who looks better in it, her or Vanessa? Rick does not want to play this game, where he has to deny that something is happening between him and Vanessa, an unpleasant and duplicitous woman who hired a stripper for a PTA party, and Gayle really doesn’t want to trust Rick. I’m…on the side of the husband? in the Lifetime movie? Oh no I gazed upon the yoga outfit and now my mind is crazed. Rick sleeps on the chesterfield sofa tonight, so that Gayle can continue snooping on Vanessa’s dead husband in peace.

Gayle wanders into an office where rich people hand money around to each other, you know, and asks for the services of one esteemed Bill van de Berg, for rich people money purposes. Unfortunately, a guy named Lance tells her, Bill actually died five years ago, after he fell down a flight of stairs. Gayle excitedly calls Rick, who correctly tells her that this information is nothing, and then Chloe’s school calls Gayle because there is a situation.

The situation is that Chloe and Serena got in a fight. The royal kitten is establishing dominance. They snipe at each other about who started it, and Vanessa informs Gayle that she’s a bad mom. The principal is hugely over Vanessa’s shit, and declares that both the girls are suspended for a day, and no, she doesn’t think Vanessa can actually have her fired, please leave, good lord. Vanessa and Serena march to Vanessa’s Mustang convertible, and Chloe tells her mom that yeah, these girls suck, but they’re kind of her only friends. As someone who had literally one terrible friend the whole first year after I moved to a new school, I get it. It’s this or going full hikikomori.

At home, Gayle continues to obsess about Vanessa, and she shows Rick a news story about her husband dying. He fell down the stairs! “Who falls down their own stairs?” Gayle wonders triumphantly. Rick is like, people. People fall down their own stairs and die literally all the time. He also points out something else Gayle should be worrying about: someone named “V” is leaving extremely bad reviews on her website, claiming they found a human hair in a cookie. “This is libel, or slander!” Gayle proclaims, not knowing which is which, and confident you don’t know either. This is, also, where I learn that her name is “Gayle” because her website says “Gayle’s Goodies.” Amateur hour on the closed captioning.

It’s 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday and the PTA is doing “campus beautification,” i.e., picking up trash that their disgusting children strew about for fun. Gayle buttonholes fellow mom Dinah to ask about the death of Vanessa’s rival Lexie. Dinah takes about seven seconds to tell Gayle she’s being a nosy ghoul before admitting she gave Lexie a couple sleeping pills, not enough to cause her to overdose, but Vanessa knows Dinah gave Lexie pills and, should I just diagram this? Okay.

At the next PTA spectacular, Gayle has a huge announcement. Is Vanessa being indicted? Is her husband actually alive? The stakes could not be higher — oh she got a milkshake place to donate 30% of one night’s profits to the PTA. Well, Frank is impressed. “Red Velvet Shake Company, wow!” says Frank. Very unclear if Frank has any idea about the nightmares and the deaths and the strippers, or if Frank simply likes doing projects with a bunch of nice gals. After the meeting, Gayle corners Sunny to learn about another convoluted tendril of Vanessa’s master plan. Sunny is the PTA treasurer and Vanessa threatened to tell their PTA overlords that she was embezzling PTA funds unless Sunny agreed to go along with pretending that Bill died from just falling down the stairs like a regular person. The thing is, Vanessa has a truly threatening aura, so if she gets in your face and hisses some circuitous blackmail threat, you’ll just go along with it. You’ll go along with it, and when you explain it to someone else, they’ll go along with it too. Anyway, Sunny accidentally invites Gayle to another PTA party at Vanessa’s, this one’s a massage party! Gayle declines, she hates massages.

On the other oiled-up hand, Gayle gets a call informing her that several people at a baby shower she catered had to go the hospital with food poisoning, and Gayle immediately decides that Vanessa poisoned the baby shower to make her look bad and she has to go to the massage party to confront her. Vanessa was capable of one straightforward and decisive action in her life, and she wasted it on shoving her husband down the stairs. (His own stairs!)

Gayle shows up at the massage party (massage?? party???) with a tray of cookies that no one will touch. She apologizes to Serena for the scene in the principal’s office and hopes Serena won’t hold a grudge. Serena cheerfully replies that her mom says grudges make you stronger. There genuinely are a few pretty good lines in this movie. Gayle wanders around Vanessa’s house unsupervised until she happens upon a whole-ass commercial elevator with a metal grate door and hops in like this is a normal thing to find in a McMansion. When she gets out on the second floor, Vanessa has beaten her up there and correctly accuses Gayle of snooping. Gayle counters that Vanessa has probably been leaving her fake bad reviews on her website. We’re past this point, ladies. This is like accusing the sun of being hot or the 2023 Phillies of being incapable of hitting with runners in scoring position. This conversation takes place at the top of a flight of stairs because Gayle has no instinct for self-preservation, but she makes it out alive.

Gayle, if you can believe it, thinks the police can help her out of this situation. A detective looks at the file she brought in and is like, “yes, these are bad reviews of your cookies, but have you considered: this is not my problem?” Gayle tries to convince him that Vanessa is dangerous, considering her husband and Lexie and Sunny’s badly wounded car. The detective tells her that unless the other PTA women want to come forward, she’s shit out of luck, here’s my card, it just says “lol fuck you” on it. And he doesn’t even bother to get naked! A dejected Gayle leaves the police department, watched by Vanessa, who is everywhere.

The Gardners are planning an exciting night of milkshake-getting at Red Velvet Shake Company, but first Gayle has to drop off a very plausible cookie order for an alumni meeting at the school. Of course, there is no alumni meeting. There is only Vanessa, wearing the yoga outfit she got when she rubbed herself all over Rick. Gayle is also wearing this outfit. I know it seems like a lot of setup on this outfit, but don’t worry! It absolutely doesn’t pay off. Rick texts Gayle to ask when they can expect her for milkshakes, and with a weird line about Gayle’s “tasty husband,” Vanessa grabs Gayle’s phone and tosses it away. She wants Gayle out of her hair, with her poking and her prying, and Gayle is like, oh my god, I truly do not care about the PTA that much, can I please just leave, I will quit, it is literally fine, but Vanessa attacks her when she goes to grab her phone, and steps on the phone with her stiletto heel as Gayle flees.

Apparently Gayle managed to send Rick a text that just says “help, V is”, which is sufficiently alarming to send him and Chloe to the school, but not alarming enough that they stop slurping on their Red Velvet Shake Company milkshakes. Rick runs into the school while Vanessa wanders around wielding the wee gavel she officiates PTA meetings with. She spots Gayle’s sneakers peeking around a shelf in the library and advances, gavel held aloft, but what’s this? Gayle is behind her? In stocking feet? Oh ho ho, very clever, Gayle! Gayle, unfortunately, only manages to shove Vanessa down, grab the gavel, and say “shoes off in the house!” instead of actually injuring or impeding Vanessa in any way, but that’s okay. Really…good zinger. Vanessa and Gayle wind up at the top of a staircase again, come on Gayle. Vanessa manages to back Gayle up against the banister and slap her, but when she goes to push her over, Gayle ducks and Vanessa goes over, just in time for Rick to finally find the two of them and see a blonde woman in a black and white yoga outfit hit the floor. He momentarily panics but Gayle calls out to him from the top of the staircase and he’s like, “oh haha it’s just Vanessa in a life-threatening injury situation!” Gayle is so relieved that it’s over. Me too.

It’s not quite though, because THREE MONTHS LATER: Serena visits her mom in federal prison. Vanessa’s arm is in a sling but she’s basically fine! Plus the other inmates voted her cell block president. “Oh….wow!” says Serena. Also, Sunny is the PTA president now, wow, great job Sunny. I would’ve given it to Frank, but Sunny is fine.

So, that’s it, except that while I was writing this, I noticed that Substack has an integrated AI image generator now (which sucks!! who asked for this!!! I bet they have 50,000 followers on LinkedIn!) and I asked it to make “nightmare PTA moms” and I think we can all agree it nailed it.

Thanks, Substack, for everything, including for the last issue of Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Lifetime, coming to you next time. Until then!