After "Mommy's Little Boy" Lifetime showed another "premiere" called "Double Mommy," which like the earlier film is also a follow-up to a previous Lifetime hit, "Double Daddy" — in which a young man impregnates two women, his regular girlfriend and a rich bitch who drugged him and essentially raped him, on the same night and had to deal with both babies. "Double Mommy has at least one creative behind-the-scenes person in common with Double Daddy," screenwriter Barbara Kymlicka. It's directed by Doug Campbell and one of the credited producers is Ken Sanders, and as you might expect from those credits it takes place at least around, if not definitively in, the "Whittendale universe" — Whittendale University being the college the young high-schoolers in the dramatis personae aspire to attend, though as Charles pointed out when he arrived home midway through the movie, given that most of the films in the Whittendale universe have depicted Whittendale as a place whose women students all seem to be selling their bodies as prostitutes or mistresses to afford the school's tuition, they're probably better off not getting in there.
The leading character who gets doubly pregnant is Jessica "Jess" Bell (Morgan Obenreder), whose boyfriend Ryan (Griffin Freeman) deserted her for the summer to take an internship in Sacramento (the Whittendale universe films have been ambiguous as to just where Whittendale is; early on it seemed to be back East — Vermont, maybe — but later films in the series took place definitively in California and I got the impression that "Whittendale" really means Stanford) and left her with the attentions of Brent Davick (Mark Grossman), the hottest guy in the movie and therefore, according to Lifetime's usual iconography, its principal villain. Brent has befriended Jess and hung out with her throughout the summer, but being a teenage male (and especially a teenage male on Lifetime!) he wants more than that, and when he makes an advance towards her and she says no, he's grimly determined to have his way with her whether she wants to or not. So he offers her a cola which he's spiked with a date-rape drug — since Brent's dad is the CEO of a pharmaceutical company he had no trouble obtaining it — and he parks his SUV in front of some stadium lights on campus and tells her, "No one ever says no to me," before he has his wicked way with her and she passes out completely. Next thing she knows she's in her bed at home, only her pants are undone and her leg has a bruise on it. She washes herself and hears someone at her door — and of course it's Ryan, back from his Sacramento internship and ready to resume their relationship, particularly its sexual component, then and there. She ends up this bizarre day in her life carrying twins, one male and one female, and two and one-half months later — the earliest you can have this done — she has DNA drawn from her fetuses and learns that they have different fathers: one of the babies is Ryan's but the other is
well, we know it's Brent, and the Bells manage to get the police to order him to submit to a DNA test that proves it. But Brent is able to weasel out of the rape charge against him by claiming that Jess had consensual sex with him and intimidating virtually all of the students who were at the party into saying that Jess was "all over" him and clearly was hot for him.
At times "Double Mommy" plays as if Kymlicka was aware her movie was going to be shown right after one of Christine Conradt's and she wanted to make sure she could write something even more insanely melodramatic than the Old Mistress — though she lacks Conradt's skill (or inclination) in creating complex and morally ambiguous characters. Instead "Double Mommy" comes off as a work created more to exploit a provocative title than to tell us anything new (or even not so new) about the human condition, and though I liked the social commentary about how the 1 percent think they can get away with anything and their money can always buy their way out of disastrous or downright evil actions for which the rest of us would pay big-time, other Lifetime movies (can you say "Restless Virgins"?) have done this considerably better.
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