Dark Intentions (2015)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Redundant and unnecessary.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I liked all of it: the babies, the betrayals, the big tantrums, and the mom who just wanted to take a nap. The postpartum depression angle worked for me. It started with something relatable and spun it into something completely bonkers. When Molly (Ashley Bell) shook the walls of her craftsman bungalow yelling "Will you stop trying to fix everything!!!" , it fixed the part of my soul that had forgotten how to have a good time. When Beth (Sara Rue) rolled her eyes and told Susan (Alex Essoe), "At least you gave her a rock," I spit out my Chex mix into my champagne and drank it anyway. This movie should win an Emmy for Best Performance by an Amethyst. Sure, there was an outdoor scene where everyone sounded like they were hanging out inside a seashell, but so what? If you go into this movie looking for realism, you will miss the fact that there is a club called "bumpers" or something where women put water balloons in their shirts and go out as pregnant ladies, although some prefer to use other materials. Why aren't more people talking about this? Personally, I love the psycho friend trope, and this is one of the best representations of the genre that I've seen in years.

Hey lifetime hire someone with lady parts to write your scripts. a monkey could have written a more insightful story about a barnacle. Besides be incredibly slow, the underlying misogyny oozing from every pore of this film was distressing. How could a channel meant for women make a film that was offensively ignorant of what being a mother, wife, woman, human, living creature be? I have never seen anything so insanely 2-dimensional and lacking in insight or even entertainment value. I felt very badly for the actresses who had to try to give life to this absolutely inane script. I hope lifetime learns a lesson from this - the lesson is simple. Women are people too.

In the opening minutes, we meet overly perky brunette Sara Rue (as Beth). Obviously pregnant, the ex-nurse visits an older couple. The man wants to stay with his wife, leaving Ms. Rue to struggle as a single mother. Rue furiously grabs a kitchen knife and goes "Lifetime TV movie" psycho. We don't know if she's going to slash her wrists, kill the prospective father, or plunge the knife into her own fetus. You'll have to see for yourself. The action quickly switches to wrung-out blonde Ashley Bell (as Molly). A new mother, Ms. Bell may be suffering from postpartum depression. After conferring with her hunky Los Angeles fireman husband Dean Geyer (as Brad), Bell decides to join an Internet support group for new mothers...Yep, Bell hooks up with perky mama Rue from the opening scene..."Don't Wake Mommy" is a routine entry in the psycho mother genre. Many scenes work, but there are major problems as characters move too quickly in the editing room. It gets difficult in the second half. At times, it seems like parts of the story are missing. Once, after a commercial break insert, a fairly large chunk of story appears to be missing. Characters move around illogically. One of the final scenes is mind-boggling as it suggests a character has completed an impossible crawl. Alex Essoe (as Susan Baxter) does well in the predictable best friend role and Mads Heldtberg's music is a strength. Alas, writer-director Chris Sivertson may not have had enough time or support to turn in a more acceptable product.*** Don't Wake Mommy (2015/11/09) Chris Sivertson ~ Ashley Bell, Sara Rue, Dean Geyer, Alex Essoe

Last night's fare was two Lifetime movies, one called "Don't Wake Mommy" which had had its "world premiere" the night before, and another called "Bad Sister" which was having its "world premiere" last night. "Don't Wake Mommy" was written and directed by one Chris Sivertson but followed the Christine Conradt formula so closely he (or she?) might as well have called it "The Perfect New Mom." The gimmick is that Donna (Reagan Pasternak) and her husband, firefighter Brad (the genuinely hot Dean Geyer — at least Sivertson did not follow the usual Lifetime convention of casting good-looking men only as villains!), are about to have a baby girl, Ava. Meanwhile, Beth (Sara Rue, whose IMDb.com head shot shows her in a nurse's uniform even though her character, though established as a nurse, isn't shown working as one) is introduced threatening the married (to someone else) doctor who fathered her child-to-be, a boy named Robert. She, the doctor and his wife have a confrontation in which Beth takes out a large kitchen knife and threatens to kill either the other two or herself, but she eventually slinks away in frustration and logs on to a Web site for new mothers, where she and Donna meet. The two women ultimately meet face-to-face and become friends, and use each other as baby sitters as needed. Only, since Sivertson's script has already established that Beth is crazy, we're bracing ourselves for the eventual (and inevitable) scenes in which Beth starts manifesting her craziness around Donna and gets in the way of Donna, Brad and their kid. "Don't Wake Mommy" — a rather confusing title — is Lifetime at its most routine, a by-the-numbers psycho thriller in which Sara Rue doesn't even achieve the appealingly chilly psychopathology of her predecessors in this sort of role (she makes Ashley Dulaney's performance as the analogous character in "The House Sitter" look better by comparison than I thought Dulaney was when I watched that film) and the denouement is all too predictable — indeed, throughout this movie we're anticipating each turn of the plot at least two commercial breaks ahead, evoking memories of Dwight Macdonald's praise of the 1941 version of "The Maltese Falcon" for keeping us a beat or two behind the director (the young John Huston, making his first film) instead of always ahead of him!