'The Black Widow Killer' Review: The only impressive thing about this revenge movie is that it is short
Spoiler alert for Lifetime original movie 'The Black Widow Killer'
Judy Dwyer (Erin Karpluk) is the deputy mayor of Mill Creek. Going through a tough separation for the last one year with the sheriff of the town Steven Dwyer (Ryan Robbins), Judy lives with her daughter Abby (Morgan Kohan) and goes for dinners with her childhood best friend Kendra Wilson (Alison Brooks).
Kendra's son Daniel Wilson (Bradley Hamilton), on the other hand, is Abby's high school sweetheart and the two find each other immensely in love with promises of a lifetime. Kendra is also the English teacher at Abby and Daniel's high school.
This seemingly normal setup is disrupted with Kendra's sudden death. The police feel Daniel has something to do with it and the Sheriff calls him in for questioning. But a distraught Daniel could hardly hold himself together, breaking apart at the drop of a hat.
Kendra's death has some mystery behind it and Judy just knows it. She repeatedly persuades her husband, who has only recently sent her the divorce papers, to follow her lead into a certain Jason Hall (Luigi Saracino). But being a man of the law, Steven obviously seems to know better than this woman's delirious tips, and so he doesn't. Perhaps he should have because that might have led him to the killer.
By now, the school has also gotten a substitute teacher to replace Kendra, Alice Evans (Karen Cliche). Much like the actress' last name, her presence in this movie is very much a cliche. However, 'The Black Widow Killer' is yet to tell us why and how Kendra died.
So it takes us on a rugged journey to twenty-five years ago. A car accident has resulted in the near-death of a teenage girl, and the death of the young boy with her. She has had two and a half decades to heal, change her appearance, nurse her hatred, and plan her revenge — that's it, that is the movie.
'The Black Widow Killer' is an outdated story about vengeance. It has the good ol' red herring in Jason and the redundant teenage backstory of a botched-up accident. The movie is, fortunately, only an hour and a half long — perhaps the only impressive thing about it.
But you're not watching 'The Black Widow Killer' to be impressed, no. You're watching it to pass time.