LETHAL SEDUCTION

US, 2015, 80 minutes, Colour.
Amanda Dettmer, Dina Meyer, Caleb Ruminer, Sam Lerner, Brian Thomas Smith.
Directed by Nancy Leopardo.

There is no particularly demanding reason to watch this film. It opens something like a standard college comedy, focusing on the young man, Mark, Caleb Ruminer, and his garrulous friend. Mark has a scholarship to Princeton.

He helps a 40-year-old woman, Dina Meyer, at a shop. She invites him to end install an appliance – and, suddenly, there is a willing seduction. She manipulates the young man who allows himself to be manipulated, and is trying to break free of some of the ties with his sincere but controlling mother, Amanda Dettmer. Both women are widows. The mother is in a relationship with a man who works at the aquarium – and during the credits and throughout the film there are recurring sequences of fish in the tank.

The seductive woman has something a case of fatal attractions, wanting to manipulate the young man, turning against his mother – a strong scene where she comes to dinner and there is this verbal and emotional clash between the two women, the mother’s partner finding her too controlling and wanting to opt out. When the mother makes a peace offering, the seducing woman rejects her, and abducts the young man’s friend, ties him up in the sauna, traps his mother, and cuffs her and commands that she killed herself.

Needless to say, the mother turns the tables on the woman – and there is peace at home, after the partner has killed the woman, and the young man goes off to his college career.

A kind of pulp telemovie.