Secrets in Suburbia (2017 TV Movie) User Reviews

Ed Wood Lives

[kambbul · 6/10 · 8 November 2022]

From the opening scene to the tragic conclusion this film plays with movie making conventions. There is no subtle exposition. The crew must have had fun coming up with a steady flow of tongue in cheek parodies.

When a possible perpetrator leaves a small bottle marked with a skull and crossbones on the kitchen counter you know this ain't Hitchcock.

When the family dog is found dead in the outdoor trash bin, little pink tongue hanging out, it's hard to contain laughter. And what does the aforementioned perp do? Why, he rushes the pup to the nearest crematorium. How else do normal people dispose of their beloved Fido's?

There is no doubt the filmmakers are fans of Ed Wood and early John Waters. Instead of labeling the movie "mystery thriller" it should have been "dark campy comedy". Or not?

Lots of Melodramatic Glamour...

[vnssyndrome89 · 5/10 · 14 October 2023]

Secrets in Suburbia (TV Movie 2017) 4.6 out of 10 stars Time to Read: 1:50

*WARNING: ANIMAL DEATH AS PLOT DEVICE, TWO SUICIDES SHOWN IN GRAPHIC DETAIL (SEE CLOSING NOTES)

BASIC PLOT:

Gloria (Brianna Brown) is not a woman to be trifled with, as her husband Phil (Joe Williamson), and her three "best friends", Scarlet, Monica and Kim, will soon come to understand. Kim (Linn Bjornland) and Scarlet (Tara Conner) have both been sleeping with Phil, and Monica (Onira Tares) has been conspiring with him to steal Gloria's money. But you know what they say ....hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

WHAT WORKS:

*GORGEOUS, QUALITY FILM MAKING It's a beautifully shot movie by Damián Romay (director) and Juan Hernández (cinematographer). You just don't see these kind of quality visuals anymore, and it's a pleasure to watch.

*THE FORESHADOWING IS J-U-S-T RIGHT The foreshadowing about who Phil (Joe Williamson) is having the affair with is NOT telegraphed, which is a welcome change from most made-for-tv movies.

*GOOD TRAILER, GOOD COVER ART

WHAT DOESN'T WORK:

*NARCISSISTIC SOCIOPATHS DON'T KILL THEMSELVES If the intimation is, Scarlet (Tara Conner) kills herself because her oxys are gone, give me a break! People with that kind of money would call up a concierge doctor, and get well. Or they'd check themselves into the finest private rehab money can buy, but they DON'T KILL THEMSELVES!

*IT'S A BIT SLOW The pacing is a little bit off, it feels a little slow at times.

*HURTING/KILLING ANIMALS SHOULD NEVER BE USED AS A PLOT DEVICE - full stop. A dog is killed as a plot device, be warned.

*MOST WOMEN KNOW WHAT IT MEANS WHEN THEIR HUSBAND TURNS DOWN SEX It means an affair, and women know it. Gloria (Brianna Brown) would know it too.

*ANTIFREEZE POISONING SHOWS UP IN AN AUTOPSY Ethylene glycol causes acidosis, optic nerve damage, nervous system depression, damage to the kidneys, resulting in stones and crystals, and finally shutting down renal activity altogether. Anyone young, without an obvious cause of death, would have an autopsy. The coroner would find the above markers, which would lead to chemical testing. In other words, YOU WOULD GET CAUGHT!

*WHY DOES PHIL NEED TO KILL GLORIA IF HE'S FOUND A WAY TO EMBEZZLE HER MONEY? If Phil (Joe Williamson) and Monica (Onira Tares) have found a way to embezzle Gloria's money, why do they need to kill her? Also, it's a bit problematic they don't resolve Gloria getting her money back.

*NEITHER PHIL, NOR MONICA HAVE ACCESS TO GLORIA'S ACCOUNTS and that means, they wouldn't be able to embezzle, especially ten million. Banks keep track of large transactions, and they would have alerted Gloria to suspicious activity.

TO RECOMMEND, OR NOT TO RECOMMEND, THAT IS THE QUESTION:

*This is a fairly decent made-for-tv movie. It is beautifully shot, with lots of great visuals. The pacing is a bit slow, and there are quite a few plot holes, but overall, it's a decent time waster.

CLOSING NOTES:

*I don't believe in trigger warnings, but as someone who has had many suicides in my life, I think it is appropriate to warn others, if they are depicted in movies or TV shows. Some visuals can set you off, and this movie has two graphic suicides, and an unneeded animal death (as a plot device). The animal death is unnecessary, and should have been eliminated. If these things are a trigger for you, please skip this movie. And as always, if you need help: 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Hours: Available 24 hours. Languages: English, Spanish.

*This is a made-for-tv movie, please keep that in mind before you watch\rate it. TV movies have a much lower budget, and so your expectations should be adjusted.

*I have no connection to the film, or production in ANY way. This review was NOT written in ANY way by a bot. I am just an honest viewer, who wishes for more straight forward reviews, and better entertainment. Hope I helped you out.

Crowding virtually all Lifetime's clichés into one script

[mgconlan-1 · 3/10 · 18 April 2017]

I put on the TV April 15 for the second "Premiere" movie on Lifetime, something originally called "Secrets and Sins" but aired under the much duller title "Secrets of Suburbia." One would think it's really not that novel an observation that people in suburbia often have affairs with people other than the ones they're married to, but Damián Romay, who both wrote and directed this (and therefore, as I like to say about bad movies in which the director and writer were the same person, he has no one to blame but himself), seems to act like he's just discovered it. The IMDb.com page on the film fails to identify one of the four leading actresses (there's only one significant male part) — the young, attractive Black woman who plays Monica, the divorce attorney who as the film begins has just successfully represented Scarlet (Tara Conner) in her divorce from a man named Troy. The film begins at a party where Scarlet is celebrating her divorce and thanking the friends who made it possible and supported her through it at their regular Thursday night get-togethers at which they absent themselves from any menfolk in their lives, get drunk on wine, play card games and gossip, gossip, gossip.

It's also established that the action takes place in a college town and all the principal characters — Monica, Scarlet, Kim (Linn Bjornland), Gloria (Brianna Brown, top-billed) and her husband Phil (Joe Williamson) — attended the college, which is called St. Francis. However, while Scarlet, Gloria and Kim all came from families with money, Monica and Phil were scholarship students and, as George Orwell described his life in a British prep school in his grim essay "Such, Such Were the Days," the students with money looked down heavily on the students without it, bullied them and called them "charity cases." That didn't stop Gloria from agreeing to marry Phil when he proposed after Scarlet dumped him, but she's kept him on a strict allowance and has set up the $10 million she inherited from her father in a tightly controlled trust fund he isn't allowed to touch because it's being saved for their kids (they have a son named Bradley, played by Brody Behr, and a daughter who's sort of in the background, and they pack the kids away to summer camp at the start of the plot so writer Romáy doesn't have to slot them into the later action).

The big thing that happens at Scarlet's divorce party is that her ex, Troy, shows up with a gun, threatens her and her three best friends, then shoots himself in front of her guests — but that is pretty much forgotten through the rest of the film. Instead, we get periodic flashbacks to the party as we learn what else is going on between the four women and Phil. We're led to believe that Phil's and Gloria's marriage is rocky but we don't realize how rocky it is until we see Phil use a hypodermic to extract a toxic fluid from a blue plastic bottle (it's antifreeze, we later learn) and inject it through the cork into the wine bottle Gloria is going to take to the next get-together. My husband Charles came home one-third of the way through "Secrets of Suburbia" and told me when it was over that what he'd seen made no sense — and I assured him that it didn't make any more sense to me even though I'd seen the film all the way through.

It seemed through much of the running time as if Romáy had been attempting to crowd all the Lifetime clichés he could think of into one script, and about the only even remotely creative thing he did was in his casting of Joe Williamson as Phil. Instead of the drop-dead gorgeous type that usually portrays a Lifetime male villain, he cast a stocky guy of medium height and tousled hair, reasonably nice-looking but hardly irresistibly attractive, the sort of actor that generally gets cast on Lifetime as the understanding husband who helps his wife fend off the maleficent attractions of the hot-looking stalker or psycho who's after her for nefarious reasons. Other than that, and some bizarre touches like the quartet of four cellos that entertains at Scarlet's party and the use of the fast theme of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" overture as running gags — it's established that Gloria herself was an amateur cellist and was good enough to pursue it professionally but gave it up when she married Phil (and there's a nice scene that shows her frantically playing her cello when she returns home after killing Kim and waits for the police to show up and interrogate her), "Secrets of Suburbia" is just a typical Lifetime movie, and not an especially good one at that: other Lifetime writers and directors, notably Christine Conradt, have got considerably more out of these familiar situations than Romay did.

Horrible acting

[Monroe69 · 1/10 · 2 November 2022]

The previous highly rated reviews is laughable. I like my share of Lifetime movies but this is quality and acting on another level of sub-standards if there was one that existed for even Lifetime movies(if it is one). Don't get me wrong I tried to give this a chance but it was that horrible. I've watched movies with actors who weren't well known either and the acting was great but this was not THE one. I couldn't even watch more than 10 minutes with the awful acting. The star was for the house. I loved the house where it was filmed at. Pass on this movie unless you like wasting your time. I watched commercials that were better than this.

this has got to be a joke....

[redinnevada · 1/10 · 10 November 2022]

There's just no way the people involved in this could have ever thought this was gonna fly for real. They 100% had to know that this was a joke movie that drunk women would turn on and just let run while they zoned out watching it lost in their own real housewives of lala-stupidity-land.

The plot is sub-par but hey...any lifetime movie usually is. The acting is so atrocious I'm surprised real names were used in the credits. But the writing? Oh my god...what 12 yr old was brought in to write this garbage?

She showed up at the door soaked in blood with actual handprints of blood on her dress to shock people. And they LET her happily go take a shower, change her clothes, then BURN her blood soaked clothes while they debated whether or not they should call the police??? These are the worst writers and actors to EVER be involved in one show. They ALL showed up for this piece of trash.

I fast-forwarded to the end just out of curiosity, the kind that makes you pull over to see dismembered bodies strewn about from a massive car crash along the highway or a plane crash or something. I just couldn't help myself or stop myself from looking.

This garbage would be great for a game...drink a shot everytime they speak. That's it. Just that. You're gonna wanta be that blitzed by the end.

Coal Miner's Daughter

[lavatch · 7/10 · 10 August 2020]

No truer words were ever spoken than those of Gloria Clark's father about his wastrel son-in-law Phil. The father was the owner of a coal mine, and Phil's father was worked to death in the mines. His dear mother worked as a charwoman, cleaning toilets at the St. Francis Academy, so that her boy could attend a prestigious school. Then, Phil married the daughter of the coal mine owner. And the father recognized Phil for precisely what he was: "a worthless bum."

In the community in which the main set of characters grew up, it was an incestuous environment. While they have stayed friends over the years, there is baggage brought along by everyone. The three best friends of Gloria, including Scarlett, Monica, and Kim, have all had some sort of illicit relationship with the gadfly Phil.

While Phil is attempting to poison Gloria and run away with any one of the three women who will accompany him, the coal miner's daughter gets wise to Phil's plan. The former cello player is no dummy, and Gloria plots revenge on the whole pack of them.

As opposed to a linear narrative, there was a meandering flow to the film that juggled the past and the present. The filmmakers became overly cute in repeating in flashback the opening scene in which Scarlett in throwing a gala celebration in honor of her divorce from her husband. Troy, the husband, blunders into the proceedings and takes his life. We then see the scene over and over from the different perspectives of Scarlett, Gloria, Monica, and Kim. From the labored plot device, the pacing of the film was slow and tedious.

The most intriguing character was Gloria, who was a good mom with solid values and a good business sense as the coal miner's daugther. She was adamant not to give the trust money to her scoundrel of a husband. There was a nice montage at the end with Gloria playing on her cello a selection from "The Barber of Seville," while we watch her handiwork replayed in the comeuppance against her three "friends" and a husband who was nothing more than a worthless bum.

Don't waste your time!

[sgtpotter · 1/10 · 25 November 2022]

Seriously, this movie has got to be the worst one I have ever watched. The acting is horrible. The dialog is predictable and sounds as if it were written by a middle schooler and not a very smart middle schooler at that. The plot is horrible with many holes and a total lack of logical progression. There is a feeble attempt to create tension with music which totally fails. Nothing about the movie is believable. The characters are shallow and it's even impossible to feel sympathy for the protagonist while her husband tries to murder her. Everything about this movie is horrible. I'm embarrassed that I watched the whole thing rather than turning it off after the first few minutes. It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Don't waste your time!

Amazing and well done from start to finish

[rachelcrasto-42297 · 10/10 · 1 November 2020]

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie as I do with almost all of the Lifetime movies. This one definitely does not disappoint and is well worth your time!

Got me hooked

[desirejg · 10/10 · 16 July 2020]

I Love Lifetime movies. If my t.v. isn't on a true crime show then it's on LMN. Most of the time there will be dramatic acting beautiful houses and lots of botox, you know, all the typical Lifetime movie traits but this was pretty good. The lead actress Breanna brown absolutely killed it! She was so good in this movie I just wanted to hold her and tell her she will be ok. She re

not the norm

[keona-76985 · 10/10 · 13 June 2017]

I really love this movie a lot of Lifetime movies are about the same thing this movie is just so different I think the writing is brilliant the directing is brilliant I just love it but I give the actors and the directors all 10s across- the-board most movies are about a crazy stalker something like that but this one was totally different loved it

I was hooked

[amarnold-52453 · 9/10 · 20 December 2022]

This movie kept my attention from beginning to the end. I was genuinely shocked at whom the worthless husband was really having an affair with. I wouldn't have ever suspected it. I wanted to beat him up for how he treated his son. When he said "do you know how this would make me look", it told me everything I needed to know about him. I can't believe how everyone was able to talk the lawyer into anything. She was supposed to be the level headed one. I was amazed at how calm the wife was throughout everything. She remained calm despite knowing how much her husband and best friend wanted her dead. I loved this movie.