Deadly Lessons
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
A teenaged girl, Stephanie Aggiston, is sent to Starkwater Hall Boarding School, a prestigious private girl's academy for the summer to brush up on Advanced French. Stephanie is a country girl and finds the school to be a bit snobbish. She makes friends with Marita Armstrong, Cally and Shama, who is a Saudi princess and her roommate.
Murders began occurring and Det. Russ Kemper comes to investigate. As more girls are killed, everyone worries about who will be next. Stephanie attempts to find the murderer herself. She enlists the help of the new attractive stable-boy, Eddie, who falls in love with her for 'not being like the other girls.' Suspicion soon falls on Eddie as the murderer.
As the summer progresses, the girls are slowly evacuated from the school. Marita is kidnapped on the day she is set to leave by the school's janitor, Robert. Robert bounds and gags Marita in his quarters on campus, somehow deluded into thinking his daughter was Marita's mother (which is not true). When Marita is able to signal from her captivity, Stephanie has Kemper follow her as she heads out "alone" to attract Robert's attention, allowing Kemper to make an arrest and save Marita.
Later, Stephanie is ambushed and chased by a mysterious figure, dressed all in black. The person is revealed to be Kemper, the real killer. The first death, Tember Logan, was an accident, as she drowned. It gave Kemper the idea to kill the other victims as a means of getting revenge on Miss Wade, who is revealed to be his mother, for abandoning him as a child. The murders were a means of ruining the reputations of her and the school. He is taken away and apprehended.

Review: The I have am not going on anywhere else from me the most way to of. The I have want to a solid friend performance in of my a follow few $ the hole $ in hole and in a the Undisputed World is not the. Mmhh, where did I see this movie before?. Heroine young student is seduced by handsome professor. Loser ex- boyfriend kid and female best friend snoop on them. Heroine and professor are caught red handed and he is fired, and she elopes with him. All very romantic. They move into cabin with nearby neighbors who all know about the professor's dark past, two previous wives mysteriously disappeared. Hey, dude, why not move into a cabin on the other side of town instead?Sounds familiar? Sure, because it is one of the five or so standard plots for Lifetime movies. Anything new in this one? No, not really. Heroine finally confronts hubby and he reveals all. Physical fight ensues. The young, small thin heroine knocks out the strong, fit, angry husband four times. Yes, four times! And in the last one she physically throws him off a bridge to his death. Really? I worry about our young daughters who watch these movies and become convinced that they can overpower and kill strong, burly angry men in real life.. More sophisticated than the Lifetime norm. Lifetime did the director (David DeCoteau) and writers (Eve Holdway and Taj Nagaoka) of "Deadly Lessons" no favors by scheduling the "world premiere" of their movie right after the "world premiere" of "Infidelity in Suburbia" because the juxtaposition of the two heightened their formula similarities, when "Deadly Lessons" was actually a much finer, more moving and more entertaining piece of work. This time the damsel who unbeknownst to her has just sent distress an engraved invitation is a college student named Lisa (Christie Burson), a third-year undergraduate with ambitions to be a doctor, and in the opening scene she's with her friends Tiffany (Sammi Barber) and Patrick (James Drew Dean — obviously he uses the middle name because just "James Dean" was rather famously taken over 60 years ago; he's nowhere near as hot and sexy as his namesake but he's easy enough on the eyes) attending a class in ethics being taught by Michael Harris (Ryan Scott Greene). Michael is a younger version of the tall, lanky, sandy-haired types Lifetime generally likes for their middle-aged leading men — usually as the husband the heroine is being sorely tempted to stray from — and for some reason he has to hold his lecture class outside on the campus lawn. (Is this university — an unnamed college in the Pacific Northwest so it can be "played" by locations in British Columbia, Canada — that crowded that he's leading what amounts to an overflow class?) Michael is giving Lisa a hard time in class and, when the bell rings, he rather peremptorily announces to her that he expects her to meet him in his office immediately. We're expecting that he's going to hit on her, perhaps blackmailing her into having sex with him in return for a better grade, but — surprise!— as soon as they get into the office and close the door, they start sucking face. They're already lovers, and what's more, she's as happy about that as he is. Only Tiffany and Patrick are spying on the lovebirds and use their smartphones to catch them being affectionate at Michael's home that night — and they report him to the dean (Cedric De Souza).The dean immediately asks Michael to resign, but promises him a good recommendation so he can still get a job somewhere else in academe, and he says Lisa can continue at the college and it won't go on her record that she slept with a professor. No way, says Lisa: where my man goes, I go — even though that means losing the tuition she already paid for that semester, losing her chance to continue in college and losing her relationship with her mother, who announces to her that if she does such a dumb thing as sacrifice her education and her ambitions for some guy, mom wants nothing to do with her anymore. Michael and Lisa get married at city hall and move to Seattle, where he's landed another teaching gig and they rent a house by a lake with a spectacular view. Lisa gets invited to a faculty barbecue and is asked by the host to bring her husband, only he begs off going and when she shows up, someone accosts her as "Wendy," and she has no idea who that is. It turns out Wendy is the name of Michael's former girlfriend, who (supposedly) committed suicide on the eve of their marriage — though of course we suspect Michael murdered her — and Lisa is already the spitting image of her. The resemblance becomes even closer when Michael buys Lisa a frilly off-white dress and tells her to wear it at all times when they're home alone together — and later on Lisa finds a photo of Wendy wearing an identical dress. There's also a sequence in which we see an old wooden trunk in Michael's and Lisa's hallway, and we have no idea what's in there but we know from the sinister music we hear when it's shown on screen that there's something incredibly evil about it . . .Though obviously drawing on the same cliché bank as "Infidelity in Suburbia," Deadly Lessons is a far more powerful and moving piece of work: Michael is a genuinely conflicted character, far more than the cardboard villain of "Infidelity in Suburbia," and as the film progressed I found myself reminded of similar movies in the 1940's in which naïve young women found themselves married to mysterious men with sinister secrets: Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspicion," George Cukor's "Gaslight," Max Ophuls' "Caught." I'm not for a moment suggesting that David DeCoteau is in Hitchcock's, Cukor's or Ophuls' league as a director, but he's working with a script far more sophisticated than the Lifetime norm, with more complex characterizations in both the lead roles, and he's alive to its complexities and fully realizes them on screen despite some bits in the movie that tend towards the usual Lifetime sillinesses. On its own "Deadly Lessons" is a quite impressive movie within the limits of the Lifetime formula, and though showing it right after "Infidelity in Suburbia" made the films look too similar, it also showed how much better DeCoteau, Holdway and Nagaoka did their jobs than David Winning and Christie Will did!