One thing Lifetime is doing lately is not only showing two "premiere" movies back to back on Saturday nights but picking films so similar in theme and plot premises they tend to reflect badly on each other. They did that again last night right after "Stalker's Prey" by running something called "Forgotten Evil" which, as you might guess just from the title, is an amnesia movie: a young woman (Masiela Lusha) is found wrapped in some sort of bag and nearly drowned. She's taken to the local hospital and gets to stay there for six months as the people looking after her try to determine who she is and how she got there. When she's finally asked to leave, Mariah (Angie Teodora Dick), one of the nurses taking care of her, offers to take her in as a roommate and helps her get a job as a file clerk and receptionist at a local school. Mariah also suggests that the amnesiac woman, whom at first she calls "Jane" as in "Jane Doe," go see therapist Dr. Evan Michaels (Jeff Marchelletta) in hopes that he can work with her, hypnotize her and help her regain her memories. "Jane" decides to adopt the name "Renée" after she sees it in a booklet of women's names, and she gets to see the hot Dr. Michaels at his home, which is also the site of his office. Renée also finds herself with a hot new boyfriend, Randy Dumas (Kyle McKeever), a nice-looking blond, though given the usual iconography of Lifetime that their best-looking males turn out to be their creepiest, we're wondering whether Randy is all he seems to be and if he might be one of the people Renée is convinced are part of a conspiracy to keep her from regaining her memory even if that means they have to kill her in the process. Meanwhile we occasionally see a hulking black-clad man in the shadows — he's heavy-set and is dressed all in black, including a black hoodie — and he seems to turn up everywhere Renée does, though for about two-thirds of this movie it's not clear whether he's supposed to be real or a figment of her imagination.
He's real, all right, and no sooner do Renée and Mariah have a falling-out, Renée announces she's moving in with Randy, and Mariah warns Renée that she really knows very little about Randy and shouldn't be so trusting of him, than we get a glimpse of the heavy-set man in the black clothes and hoodie, the hood comes off and we realize it's Randy. As with your typical Lifetime villain, Randy spirals out of control from understandable garden-variety madness to out-and-out craziness. Forgotten Evil, which may have been intended for theatrical release (partly because of the expert Gothic finish director Ferrante gave the material and partly because there are some odd blips on the soundtrack), seems like just another Lifetime movie with amnesia as their "disease of the week" and a cop-out ending that really doesn't make sense. It doesn't help that the acting in this one is pretty nondescript — yes, I know the characters themselves are pretty nondescript, and Masiela Lusha has the confounding task of portraying a woman who literally doesn't know anything about who or what she is, but the only player who comes across as genuinely interesting and charismatic is Kyle McKeever as the villain.
He's real, all right, and no sooner do Renée and Mariah have a falling-out, Renée announces she's moving in with Randy, and Mariah warns Renée that she really knows very little about Randy and shouldn't be so trusting of him, than we get a glimpse of the heavy-set man in the black clothes and hoodie, the hood comes off and we realize it's Randy. As with your typical Lifetime villain, Randy spirals out of control from understandable garden-variety madness to out-and-out craziness. Forgotten Evil, which may have been intended for theatrical release (partly because of the expert Gothic finish director Ferrante gave the material and partly because there are some odd blips on the soundtrack), seems like just another Lifetime movie with amnesia as their "disease of the week" and a cop-out ending that really doesn't make sense. It doesn't help that the acting in this one is pretty nondescript — yes, I know the characters themselves are pretty nondescript, and Masiela Lusha has the confounding task of portraying a woman who literally doesn't know anything about who or what she is, but the only player who comes across as genuinely interesting and charismatic is Kyle McKeever as the villain.