The Perfect Guy – The Bad Kind of Lifetime Movie

Runtime: 100 minutes

Release Date: September 11, 2015

Rating: PG-13

Director: David M. Rosenthal

Leah is the type of classic movie character that I hate. Though she has a good job and a good life with her boyfriend of two years Dave, all she can think about is getting married and having babies. After a particular fight, she breaks up with him in the hopes of giving him time to think things over and realize that he wants to marry her and have lots of babies.

While sitting at the bar and waiting for a friend who cancels at the last minute, she meets an irritating businessman who keeps hitting on her. Enter Carter, an attractive man she met in passing at the coffee shop while still with Dave. Carter saves her from a bad situation and seemingly becomes the perfect man overnight. He treats her with respect, loves her cat, loves being around her friends and family, and even wants to make plans with her for the future.

It doesn't take long before he drops the L-bomb and wins over her father, making everyone think he is the perfect guy. That all changes when she sees his dark side. After a man keeps talking to her outside his parked car, Carter suddenly attacks and beats the man senseless. He apologizes and promises that he would never hurt her, but she's had enough and end things. That leads to Carter slowly stalking her, stealing her cat, and basically making her life a living hell while the police do little to stop him.

If you read my plot synopsis of The Perfect Guy and wondered why it sounded familiar, it's because it is literally the same plot of 900 made for television movies released in the 1980s and 1990s. When it ended, I looked at my roommate and said, “didn't we see this movie before,” which prompted him to say it was like a straight up bad Lifetime movie. It literally made no sense why this actually played in theaters and didn't wind up on television instead.

Everything about the movie is a total cliché. Leah is a busy working girl who never quite found the time to settle down and have a family, and Dave is the working guy who isn't quite ready to settle down with her. When she started whining about being 36 and still not being a wife and mother, I seriously wanted to slap her. Does that mean that she expects Dave to marry her and immediately knock her up? She was literally two seconds away from “forgetting” her birth control pills or poking holes in his condoms.

The only redeeming feature is Michael Ealy. I've seen him in a few films, most recently the remake of About Last Night, and I thought he was the standout. He's the perfect combination of sexy and suave in the beginning and dark and creepy later. You actually get why someone would fall in love with him so quickly. He even had a few moments that left me feeling a little squeamish, including when he licked her wineglass to get her lipstick off it and when he literally sucked on her toothbrush. Add to that a scene where he creepily holds her cat while remotely viewing her computer, and it's clear why he's the standout.

The Perfect Guy isn't a horrible movie, but it's one we've all seen many, many, many times before. It sadly lacked all the cheesy fun of a made for Lifetime movie too...

No Good Deed – Never Let a Good Looking Stranger Into Your Home

Runtime: 84 minutes
Release Date: September 12, 2014
Rating: PG-13
Director: Sam Miller


Colin is a serial killer stuck in prison and denied parole. Unhappy with the board's decision, he escapes from prison and goes back to see his ex-girlfriend. After taunting her a bit, he reveals that he knows she had a new boyfriend and that he isn't happy. He brutally kills her before taking off again.


Terry is a former lawyer who defended women against their boyfriends and husbands before settling down with her husband Jeffrey and becoming a stay at home mom of two kids. Though the two once had a good marriage, they've had problems recently. She shares some of her troubles with her best friend Meg, who makes it clear that she doesn't approve of her friend's husband.


Though Terry urges Jeffrey to stay home for the weekend, he plans to go away with his dad and promises that the two will go away together soon. After Jeffrey leaves and Meg makes plans to come back later that night. Terry makes dinner and tries to go on with her life. In the middle of a bad storm, she hears a knock on the door and finds Colin on the other side.


Claiming that he lives a few streets over and had a car accident, he asks to use her phone and offers to wait outside. Terry, feeling bad for him, brings him the phone and then lets him into the house. So desperate for companionship, she offers him a drink, gives him a clean shirt to wear, and cleans his wounds. As the two grow closer throughout the night, Colin slowly begins to reveal his dark side and reveals what made him show up on her doorstep.


The trailers for No Good Deed made it look like one of those taunt thrillers, but the film itself is barely a step above a Lifetime television movie. As someone who has seen so many of those movies, I'm actually pretty shocked that Idris Elba even agreed to do it after reading the script.


Terry starts out as just another bored and frustrated housewife. Once Colin arrives and she begins telling him about her past, it's almost laughable. She goes on and on about how she helped all these women and how she hates abusive men. It eventually reaches the point where you want to just scream at the television about why she doesn't realize the same type of guy is right in front of her.


Since this is a PG-13 movie, there's really no violence either. It's one of those movies where you see him pick up a girl by the throat, the camera pans away, and then she's dead. There is a scene where someone gets a shovel to the head that made me jump slightly, but then it's right back to a lack of horror or gore.


Elba is pretty good in the movie, but let's face it, that man is good in everything he does. Sadly for him, he just can't carry this movie all by himself or make it better than the script. The only way I would recommend it is if you're a big Elba fan or you love movie of the week/women in peril television movies.