Sometime in the Nineties, before the Lifetime Network took complete ownership of suspenseful TV movies, the networks–especially NBC–ran a slew of them and several were aimed at teens.  They’d had success during the late 1980s with a bunch of kids/teen TV movies, such as Crash Course and Dance Til Dawn, but I would imagine that the shift to drama happened because of the popularity of teen television drama in the first half of the decade.  The biggest things on television for adolescents were MTV’s The Real World and Fox’s Beverly Hills 90210, both of which provided enough drama (and in the case of the latter, soapy drama) that the network probably thought they could pull an audience.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of a number of these movies over the years, many of which star Tori Spelling, but also featured actresses like Tiffani-Amber Theissen, Kellie Martin and Candace Cameron and had titles like The Face on the Milk Carton or Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?  In the fall of 1996, they put another one out, Lying Eyes, although this one stars Cassidy Rae, who at that point was probably best known for a recurring role on Melrose Place as well as its spin-off Models, Inc.  She plays a high school senior named Amy who gets involved in an affair with a much older guy and then someone starts stalking her and … 

… I honestly have no idea why, but I have not only seen this movie three times (once for the sake of this blog post and twice prior), but it’s stuck with me ever since it first aired nearly thirty years ago.  I’ll try to get to that after I run through the plot.

So like I said, Cassidy Rae plays Amy. She’s pretty; she’s blonde; she’s a popular cheerleader.  At the beginning of the movie, we’re introduced to her via a cheer routine that she’s taking part in during a basketball game (with plenty of very close-up shots of her body) and everything seems pretty much normal except there’s this older guy in the stands who is paying a little too much attention to the cheerleaders.  He’s Derek Bradshaw, who’s played by Vincent Irizarry, a veteran soap actor who was most recently on The Bold and the Beautiful but is probably best known for playing David Hayward on All My Childern for nearly 15 years.  Derek arranges a meet cute with her by “accidentally” rear-ending Amy as they’re both on the way home from the game.  He says “Let’s skip the insurance; I’ll pay for it” and she seems okay with that.

When Amy picks up her car, she’s surprised to see that not only was her bumper fixed, but Derek had the guys at the shop install a brand new stereo with a CD player.  I’m pretty sure it had one of those removable faces too, because this is the Nineties.  And we also know it’s the Nineties because “Dreams” by The Cranberries is on the soundtrack at least twice. Anyway, she’s all “how can I repay you” and he says “you can go to dinner with me” and then they start sleeping together.  No, really.  They seem to go from accident to dinner to soft music and candles within maybe ten minutes of the movie.  But I guess we have to because there’s a whole stalker storyline that’s going to be the bulk of the conflict later on.  

So Amy starts blowing off her best friend Dana (Ashlee Levitch, who looks a lot like Brittany Murphy in Clueless) for Derek, but Dana does know about the relationship as does her older, college-aged sister Jennfer.  In fact, Jen becomes a shoulder to cry on and a good person to go to for advice, especially when Amy eventually discovers (as if we didn’t see this coming) that Derek is married.  Now, of course, he plays the usual cards–“Our relationship is basically over,” “I’m going to leave her soon”–speaking in creepy sleaze cliches to assuage her anger when she confronts him.  And she falls for it, even to the point where she starts to rethink going away to college because she’s sleeping with this guy.  Dana and Jen think this is a terrible idea–especially Jen, who is supportive of Amy and tells her to “be her own person”.  It will take almost all of Amy’s friends to convince her that maybe being a mistress isn’t the best idea, and she not only talks to Derek’s wife (who’s all, “Go away, tramp”), she breaks up with him.

Now, the entire time this affair has been going on, Amy has been stalked by … someone.  We don’t know.  All we know is that when it’s time for stalking we get a first-person point-of-view shaky camera with ominous music that’s right out of a cheap slasher flick.  The stalking starts with destruction of some of her clothing and mailing threatening notes using that were cut from the pages of Seventeen or Cosmo or something but it eventually gets to the point where the stalker actively tries to kill her by locking her in the sauna after cheer practice and turning the temperature all the way up.

There are two people who are the possible stalker at this point: Derek’s wife, who knows about the affair and wants Amy to fuck off; and Derek, who is the one who saves her from dying in the sauna.  And when it comes to the latter, that’s a strong clue, because how the hell does a grown man get into the girls locker room of a high school without anyone suspecting anything?

Ah, but it’s neither of them.  Derek’s wife is basically going to go after him in a divorce and Derek just lays on the cliche some more.  It’s only when the stalker follows Amy in her car and tries to run her off the road–and off of a cliff–that we see that it’s Dana’s sister Jen.  

Honestly, in a movie that has absolutely no subtlety to it, Jen being the stalker wasn’t that predictable.  She becomes a confidant of Amy but doesn’t seem overly interested in anything and gives her advice like an older sister might.  Sure, she’s trying to get her away from Derek, but wouldn’t you tell your 18-year-old friend that maybe dating a married guy in his thirties is a bad idea?

Too bad it throws it all out the window by having Jen act absolutely nutso from this point on.  No, really. There’s a point where she dresses up in the lingerie that Derek bought for Amy and just looks in the mirror with the crazy eyes.  Yes.  Not lying eyes.  CRAZY EYES.  BECAUSE DEREK BELONGED TO HER AND THEN SHE GRADUATED AND MOVED ON TO AMY, SO AMY HAS TO DIE!

I honestly think that is what I remember the most.  Sure, a good-looking actress in lingerie on TV is going to definitely get into my 19-year-old head, but the whole full-force insanity of “I’ll kill you so I can have him” that absorbs her performance all the way up until the end of the movie when Jen hides in the back of Amy’s car with a knife, does a psycho monologue, starts to set the car on fire, and moves to get Amy to drive off the cliff.  Amy punches her, gets them both out of the car, the car tumbles and tumbles and explodes and explodes because the producers wanted to show where their budget went, and that’s pretty much it.

No, really.  The next scene is that Amy graduates and then we fast forward to cheerleading pracitce the following fall where Derek is in the bleachers watching the girls practice.  We don’t find out what happens to Jen.  We don’t know if Dana found out that Jen was the stalker.  It’s just … over.

Like I said at the top of this post, I don’t fully know why I am so familiar with this movie.  I remember watching it when it was on television because I think I came across it when it first aired and wound up watching it, then I caught it on cable during a stretch of unemployment about twenty years ago.  But I remember Dance ‘til Dawn because it’s awesome; I could tell you all about The Face on the Milk Carton because you don’t forget a title like that; and Moment of Truth: Stalking Back was a movie I watched in high school.  I think it was just … well, the batshittiness of it all?  The crappiness of it? The good-looking women in lingerie?

This is total disposable TV that I guess you could say is trash, although I’ve seen stuff that’s much trashier. What works here, though, is that Lying Eyes leans into the trash aspect from the jump. Amy’s in bed with Derek pretty much after their second date, and when we get to the big reveal of Jen being the stalker, her personality flip–from “concerned friend” to “complete fucking psycho”–is so overdone, it make the movie so entertaining. My only real quibble is with the shitty resolution. I get that things need to be trimmed down to fit network television time constraints, but not even a voice over on Amy’s graduation scene to say what happened to her, Dana, and Jen? Yes, I know I’m asking too much.

I have to say that I kind of miss stuff like this when it randomly popped up on TV. Network TV has its moments these days but they’re few and far between and hard to find in the enromous pile of procedurals and talent competitions that dominate their schedules. And this certainly won’t help the streaming algorithms or find its way onto any “prestige TV” list. Maybe it’s just that I’m old and don’t watch TV the way it’s “supposed” to be watched these days, but I say we bring back stuff like this that you can get sucked into when you are flipping channels. In the meantime, if you want to watch this, it’s on Tubi (and probably on YouTube).