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GIRL FOLLOWED (TV Movie 2017) 4 out of 10 stars Time to Read: 3:24 min

BASIC PLOT: Regan Lindstrom (Emma Fuhrmann) is having a tough freshman year. She's fourteen, naive about the way things work, and trying hard to fit in. Her best friend Sabine (Olivia Nikkanen), isn't really her friend at all, and keeps Regan around only to feel better about herself. At home, things aren't any better. Her parents, Abby (Heather McComb) and Jim (Joey Lawrence) favor her sister Taylor (Gianna LePera), and this has left Regan with very little self-esteem. Her immaturity, her isolation, and her self loathing has left her vulnerable to a predator in her midst. Nate (Travis Caldwell) is a medical tech, working at her mother's doctor's office. He seems nice enough, he shares her interests, and says he understands her problems, but his help often crosses appropriate boundaries. Can Regan's family finally hear her cries for help, in time to save her from Nate's predatory clutches?

WHAT WORKS: *REGAN'S SISTER IS AN A$$, AND THE PARENTS DO FAVOR HER Wow! Regan (Emma Fuhrmann) is right! Her sister, Taylor (Gianna LePera), is a selfish b*tch, and the parents do prefer her over Regan! Taylor isn't worried about her sister at all, she just cares how Regan's problems affects her, and the parents don't discourage this egocentric behavior. Regan's what we call the "Identified Patient," or IP. When there's something wrong with the family dynamic, the sanest family member rebells against the dysfunction, often by acting out in some way (drugs, violence, alcohol or sex). The problem is, the acting out is often harmful to the IP. The parents say to Regan, it's her mistake alone, but when your child fails like this, it's never their mistake alone. The parents favoring one child over the other, destroyed Regan's self-esteem, and forced her to look elsewhere for approval. It's good to see plotlines that mirror actual family problems, albeit, in a simplified way (this is a melodrama after all).

*THE CINEMATOGRAPHY/DIRECTING IS BETTER THAN MOST The shots, are mostly set up in a good way, and the visual storytelling is efficacious. A few are too close, but for the most part, you could storyboard the movie with individual shots, and that means it's a successful outing from Carole McClintock (cinematographer) and Tom Shell (director).

WHAT DOESN'T WORK: *NO FOURTEEN YEAR OLD IS THAT NAIVE No kid in this day and age is that sheltered, especially with an older sibling. The "obscene" pictures Regan sends out, are simply her in a bra and panties, which is pretty tame in 2017.

*REGAN'S QUESTIONS AND FEELINGS ARE MORE INLINE WITH SOMEONE YOUNGER I know that in our politically correct society, it wouldn't be ok to make Regan twelve, which is how she acts, but it would have made for a better movie. Having Regan be so naive at fourteen, is just not believable in the current environment. Her inexperience with sex, the way she asks Nate (Travis Caldwell) if she's pretty, all speak to someone younger, with a dysfunctional relationship with their family. Her parents refuse to take any responsibility, putting her upbringing back on her, which is pretty stressful for a twelve, or a fourteen year old.

*NATE SHOULD ALTER THE LINDSTROM'S MEDICAL INSURANCE, OR EASIER, NATE COULD JUST KILL THE COUNSELOR If the plot device is - 'Nate doesn't want Regan to see a counselor, because their relationship might be exposed', there are w-a-a-a-y easier paths to get there. Nate is a medical billing expert, he could easily tamper with the family's health insurance (show him clicking a box that would cancel the family's mental health coverage). If I'm confused about Nate's motivations (and I am), it's a fail. If it takes to long to complete the task (getting rid of the parents insurance, by sabotaging both parents jobs), it's a fail. Also, no ephebophile is going to expose his relationship needlessly, but sending the pictures to Jim's boss, does just that. Melissa Cassera, Christine Conradt and Chris Lancey really should have rethought this entire plot device.

*SCREWING WITH THE DAD'S JOB IS A BAD PLOT DEVICE No one would be fired because their young daughter was taken advantage of on the Internet. That is the STUPIDEST plot device ever! "We're firing you, or denying your promotion, because your daughter was the victim of a ephebophile." Also, the boss receiving pictures of a fourteen year old in her underwear, and opening them on his work computer, is outrageous. It's more damaging than Jim's (Joey Lawrence) fourteen year old daughter being groomed by a ephebophile. In reality, the boss might be fired or reprimanded, not Jim, her father.

*NEVER ADDRESSING THE BAD PARENTING IS A PROBLEM The family is suddenly 'healed', without the counseling they so desperately needed. Unfortunately, trauma (such as Regan's abduction) does not heal the underlying family problems that are abundant here. I'd rather hear they're going on a family vacation, to celebrate their successful completion of family therapy.

*BUSINESSES ARE TRAINED NOT TO OPEN ATTACHMENTS FROM EMAILS THEY DON'T RECOGNIZE Mr. Howard, Jim's boss, says everyone up the chain, "Got photos of your daughter from an unknown email." That means, the entire staff, opened, what could be construed as child porn, from an anonymous email address. They ALL opened the attachments, and we're supposed to believe they all still have their jobs? They work at a youth center for pity's sake! I expect more from Christine Conradt, her storylines don't usually have plot holes big enough for the whole movie to fall into.

*CONFIDENTIALITY APPLIES ALL THE TIME Detective White (Laura Kai Chen) tells Jim, "This is a child abduction case, so confidentiality doesn't apply." That's the biggest bunch of BS I've ever heard! They'd need a court order to lift confidentiality. No psychologist/psychiatrist would risk their license, and future, because some cop tells them too. It's asinine!

*THE TRAILER IS STUPID The trailer is a disjointed jumble, never capturing the ideas of the movie in it's entirety. Also, the voiceover artist starts out sounding like he's inveigling people into buying time shares, only at the end, does he use his "thriller" voice.

*THE COVER ART IS RIDICULOUS! It has nothing to do with the movie, and looks like it took about ten minutes to create. Come on guys, I could do better with my phone!

TO RECOMMEND, OR NOT TO RECOMMEND, THAT IS THE QUESTION: *That's a hard question. If you enjoy low budget family dysfunction, teenage angst, or Joey Lawrence, you MIGHT enjoy this. I understand and appreciate melodramas, and this is right on the line of watchable. 4 out of 10

CLOSING NOTES: *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. I do have a background in psychology, hope the review is not too technical.

I've never seen worse acting. The so-called actor playing the father is capable of two expressions. The mother is also wooden but at least can eke out three different faces. If their daughters are breathing, walking, eating, the parents reaction is "Oh my God! They're gonna implode! The 5.5 big one is gonna swallow them up!" Dreadful movie and complete waste of time.

Save yourselves viewers and run for the hills.

This objectively was a crash and burn movie, but I couldn't resist finishing since it was so illogical and unnatural. None of the actors have a chance here with this convoluted script. Also, the music and sound effects tend to overpower any of the dialogue.

The father character is especially wooden and over the top- I couldn't help but laugh at his angry moments and poor decision making (he eventually becomes the executive director at his company, in an ironic twist of fate).

There was an abundance of errors but the one detail that stood out is the 22 year old Nate's car. This creep drove to the main character's home, and yet neither the mom or dad had the wits about them to get the license plate or call in a description of the car to the detective. And he later kidnapped the daughter in broad daylight while the mom huffed and puffed trying to chase him, and yet when she got to Nate's home, I guess she didn't see his car parked outside the mansion. That might have given her a good clue to not enter the home. What is it with characters going to the suspect's house without any police backup?

So yeah this was a train wreck of a movie to kill time on a Saturday night, but at least I got some laughs out of it. Moral of the story: don't give your teenage daughter unrestricted use of a smart phone.

The first of the three films Lifetime showed from 6 p.m. to midnight April 8 was "Girl Followed," an obvious pun on "Girl, Interrupted" but really a pretty conventional Lifetime tale of a young woman being the target of obsessive stalking and sabotage from a somewhat older man. This time around the girl was 14-year-old Regan Lindstrom (Emma Fuhrmann), who simply can't catch a break. Her parents Jim (Joey Lawrence) and Abby (Heather McComb) spy on her constantly and treat her with all the sensitivity and love of concentration-camp commandants. This is one of those stories in which the parents are so good at keeping tabs on their kids (not only Regan but her older sister Taylor, played by Gianna LaPera) one wonders why they don't make some real money with these skills by working for the CIA or NSA. They're particularly down on any boy she expresses even the slightest romantic interest in, and so of course Regan rebels at the earliest opportunity. When her crush object Austin (Jake Elliott) breaks up with her and goes with her cuter and richer best friend Sabine (Olivia Nikkanen) instead, Sabine tells Regan her secret was she sent Austin selfies of her in her underwear, and if she wants to get him back Regan should do the same. She does so, and Sabine critiques the photos, saying that she looks good in red (her bra was red) but she needs sexier undies to strike lust in the heart of her chosen male.

Accordingly, on a shopping trip for clothes with her mom, Regan shoplifts a hot, sexy bra and panties — we get the impression it's less because the family can't afford them and more because mom would never buy things like that for her in a million years — and her new set of sexted selfies gets spread all over the school and instantly earns her a reputation as a slut. Meanwhile, Regan frequently visits mom, who works as a nurse, at her hospital, where one of mom's duties is giving out tests and treatments for STD's (which may be offered by the writers, Christine Conradt, Chris Lancey and Melissa Cacera, as an explanation for why she's so otherwise inexplicably overprotective of Regan: she sees young people coming in with the wages of sexual experimentation every day!) — and she's attracted the lascivious attentions of Nate (Travis Caldwell), the STD clinic's 22-year-old receptionist. Nate is a young man who doesn't need to work — he lives in a big house and is pretty much alone because his super-rich parents spend most of their time on vacation (indeed, I recognized the house from a previous Lifetime movie, though I can't remember right now which one) — and he's also a suspect in the mysterious disappearance of Lana, another teenage girl from the same town.

Of course the moment we see Travis Caldwell, who's tall, dark-haired, baby-faced and drop-dead gorgeous, we know he's going to be the sinister stalker who's going to menace Our Heroine — and indeed he does, though he ramps up his campaign of revenge or obsession or whatever to attack her parents as well. Conradt's presence hints at a more interesting movie than the one that got made, and if she had been in charge of the whole project instead of just co-writing an "original" (quotes definitely appropriate!) story that got turned into a script by a third scribe, she probably would have made Nate a more complex character and given at least a hint of what made him "run." Alas, Nate got depicted as your typical generic Lifetime sex-crazed maniac who gets progressively crazier as the film goes on. Also, Conradt, Lancey and Cacera offered no clue about how Abby would have reacted when she realized that the mysterious figure menacing her daughter was someone she worked with and therefore knew well and trusted. But the real person who screwed up this movie wasn't any of the writers, nor was it director Tom Shell (who did a perfectly workmanlike, though far from great, job with it), but the casting director, Mary Jo Slater. First of all, though Heather McComb and Emma Fuhrmann look enough alike to be believable as coming from the same family, McComb is young enough she looks more like Fuhrmann's older sister than her mom — and Joey Lawrence looks even younger. Lawrence has got a hot, blond, butch male bod and certainly could give Travis Caldwell competition in the looks department (too bad the writers gave him a character whose virtually only emotion is blustering anger, hardly the stuff to evoke the sexual fantasies I'd probably be having about Lawrence if I got to see him in a different sort of role), but he and McComb simply don't look old enough to have two teenage daughters. And what's more, the actress actually playing Regan's older sister, Gianna LaPera, is blonde, has curly hair and a different body type from Fuhrmann's — though maybe we were supposed to think Regan took after her mom and Taylor her dad, looks-wise. Girl Followed is a pretty generic Lifetime thriller, not all that bad but not transcendent either — though it might have been considerably better if Conradt had got to write it solo — with nice-looking people of both (mainstream) genders enacting a pretty stupid story that offers the usual Lifetime formulae but nothing more than that.

Terrible script, terrible acting.. just terrible..

Just don't lol.