LMN - Our Mother's Murder (Daughters)

This is probably one of the best (coincidentally, meaning one of the worst) Lifetime movies. This one is a pure classic. I've probably seen this movie maybe two or three times, off and on, since about 1997. As it's known on Lifetime, the movie is called Our Mother's Murder. I believe the original title is "Daughters". The movie is supposedly fact-based, or based on a true story.

So anyway, the movie's biggest star is pubescent boy fan-fav, Holly Marie Combs, who's biggest role was a character called Piper Halliwell from the uber-crap-fest WB network superstar show, Charmed. So Combs plays Alex Morrell, daughter of Anne Scripps Douglas, a famous heiress to the Scripps Howard newspaper chain. While the real-life story is pretty tragic, the movie, taken as a movie, is pretty bad.

So Alex Morrell narrates the entire movie. In the first two minutes of the film, you already hit your own head at the blatant campiness of the line, "When mom got married, she was practically almost a virgin". YIKES. So she goes on to say how her mom grew up with all this money and was really nice and protected. Then her mom married her dad and had two girls, Alex, and her sister, Annie, who's played by Sarah Chalke, who's biggest things she ever did were two "Wow, who gives an F" shows, Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother. So after Alex's mom and dad had the two of them, they then divorced.

So it starts with Annie and Alex both coming home from being away at some type of boarding school or something. They come home and find their mom racing out for a date with a "much younger man". So things escalate and eventually the mom marries the guy, who's name is Scott Douglas, played by James Wilder, a Lifetime movie regular. Turns out he's a carpenter with a bad drinking habit. Annie and Alex both suspect of him trying to move in our their mother because she's innocent, naive, and vulnerable, not to mention one of the wealthiest single women in the US.

So after a while, Anne (the mother) and Scott get pregnant and have a daughter, Victoria, often called "Tory" (what a terrible name). This is where things escalate. During a Christmas party, Anne has invited some relatives of her ex-husband, Annie and Alex's father. Scott flips out (it's suggested throughout the movie that he has some sort of inferiority complex with Anne's ex-husband) and takes Tory away from the party. Afterward, he hits Anne for inviting her ex-husband's family. After a while, things settle down. A couple years later, Anne throws another party for her daughters' friends and Scott comes home to find Anne smoking around Tory. Again, he flips out and beats attempts to beat her up, but one of Anne's friends comes in to find him and he pushes her down the stairs. The police arrive and Scott claims it's an accident. This is when Alex flips out and gets Scott to try to attack her.

The drinking/anger/beating happens again until Scott and Anne go out for a night of dinner and dancing with Anne's friends. Scott obviously doesn't fit in with the high and mighty wealthy people as he keeps trying to get them to hire him to be a builder/contractor for them. They laugh him off as they never talk business at social gatherings. Scott gives one of Anne's friends a business card which he laughingly throws in the ashtray when Scott walks away. When Scott comes back and sees it, he flies into a rage and gets in the car with Anne. Here, he tries to push her out of the car while it's going over 90 mph. He roughs her up so badly that he almost kills her and Anne runs away to hide with Alex.

This is where the second half of the movie begins. The rest is all about Anne trying to get separated from Scott and take Tory with her, which Scott finds out about and starts tormenting Anne, even threatening her when she sleeps. Eventually, Scott murders Anne and this is where the movie ends.

Pretty brutal and it's crazy that it's a true story. The movie teaches a valuable lesson to women about abusive relationships, but again, taken as a movie, it's just not that good. The best acting job is done by Wilder, who plays the part of a psycho pretty well (as he is type-cast to play these types of roles in a lot of other Lifetime movies). Holly Marie Combs more or less narrates the entire movie and just tries to look pretty most of the time. Anyone who's ever seen Charmed knows she's not the greatest actress.