Lethal Obsession

At the start of the movie, a house explodes. Outside in a car, someone watches, covered like a Middle Eastern woman in a burqa.

More than 20 years later, Nina is married to Stuart, a Chicago doctor. She runs a medical publishing business with her friend Karen, and she has two children, April and Brandon. Isabelle takes care of the children. Stuart is cheating on Nina with Miriam, a beautiful doctor who calls Nina "The Ice Queen".

Nina finds out from Mary that her grandmother in Buffalo is sick. Nina suspects her brother Drew is with Mary and claims she will not come. But Nina does visit her grandmother, claiming to her family that she is traveling to New York on business; she even brings the kids souvenirs.

Drew is quite charming and a good liar, and when that isn't enough, he threatens violence. If he has to in order to reach his goals, he will even kill.

When Drew shows up in Chicago, Stuart is happy to see him, though somewhat confused as to why Nina would deny having a brother. The kids like him too, and he likes them. The fact is that Nina (known to those in her past life as Marcia) has moved many times to keep her brother from finding her. And now that Drew has found her, Nina hires private detective George Friezen to find out about him and her college boyfriend Brent.

What is so terrible about Nina's past that she will go to this much trouble? Why is Drew such a threat to her?

There's nothing that special about his movie. I've always like Kellie Martin, but she doesn't really seem like herself here. I suppose Adam MacDonald gives the standout performance as Drew. I liked the car rental agent, whatever her name was. And Karen.

There is some violence, but nothing really explicit. For those who enjoy this sort of thing, a beautiful woman exits the shower, sees her man and drops her towel, and then a camera moves slowly from her feet at the end of the bed past the sheet that covers only what broadcast TV requires until finally reaching her head. Despite the kids and the kid-friendly movie they watch, this movie is not for children.

I enjoyed it enough.

One of the recommended films IMDb offered up for this movie, which I saw under the Lethal Obsession title, was Die A Little. It's an appropriate choice, because it reflects the feeling you get after having watched this film. A little bit of your life is gone forever. It's a cross between soft-core straight porn, a typical stalker movie, and an episode of Cheaters, with some freaky almost-sexual sibling love thrown in. And some remarkably bad acting, bad music, bad dialogue, bad costume and makeup, truly bad hair, and general badness all around. Anyone familiar with Canadian pay TV will be able to predict the logos that appear in the end credits. It's always depressing to know you paid twice for the film, once via taxation and again via your cable bill. Nevertheless, it's a better result than usual for that kind of funding. It actually gets a 6 from me, which shocks me more than anyone else, because there are some interesting parts of the story. But if there's a next time, it better be better than this.

There were tons of extra lying in this psycho thriller.

At 53 seconds into the movie hubby called wife and told the first lie.

At 1:01 he repeated the lie.

Then she lied twice to cover up his 2 lies.

From there on it was a slippery slope of all kinds of lying by just about everyone in the movie.

I briefly thought about counting all the lies. Then I knew I didn't have that much time in my life and decided to just let sleeping dogs uhh -- lie. Sorry, that's a different kind of lie, but I couldn't resist.

Maybe this movie should have been titled, Lethal Lies.

Well to the backstory: The MCs were brother Drew (Adam MacDonald) and sister Nina (Kellie Martin). Both were repeatedly abused and traumatized by their alcoholic father as children. In a final act of retaliation, Drew killed both parents by causing a house fire.

He later was sent to juvenile prison for stabbing a man who roughed up Nina. After his return, two people they both knew vanished including Nina's boyfriend whom Drew did not like.

Nina had to get away - changing her identity, her job, her location to build a whole new life to protect those around her from her extremely disturbed brother.

Now years later, Nina had a family and a good job. But Drew after much searching finally found her and discovered her handsome doctor husband wasn't making Nina happy...

Drew was boyishly handsome with a disarming smile which of course made him appear a most unlikely killer. But big sister Nina had a protective streak of her own and wasn't afraid to go all in to protect the ones she loved.

This 2007 release was 9 years before Hallmark's Haley Dean Mysteries, but even back then, this Kellie Martin character wasn't afraid to show she could push back when pushed.

IMDB's average rating for this movie is 5.1. In my viewing experience, I'm going to bump it up to 6.5.