MOTHER, MAY I SLEEP WITH DANGER? (1996) ** ½

Ivan Sergei bludgeons his girlfriend to death with a cutting board.  He then skips town under an assumed name and instantly falls in love with a college student with an eating disorder, played by Tori Spelling.  She doesn’t seem to mind his controlling ways at first, even when he starts to try to make her over like his dead girlfriend.  Once he kidnaps her and tries to keep her all to himself, her frantic mother (Lisa Bane) sets out to save her.

I hate the term “guilty pleasure”, but I will say that I have a certain weakness for a good (or bad) Lifetime movie.  Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is one of the rare Lifetime Originals that has gone on to have a second life as a cult classic.  It’s easy to see why as the hysterical acting is often priceless.  Spelling is overwrought as the college student in peril, Sergei is hilarious as the overbearing and overprotective psycho boyfriend, and Bane is over the top as Spelling’s bitchy mother.  It also has the benefit of some serious ‘90s nostalgia as the fashions and hairdos are very of the time.

Other than the amped-up performances, there’s not a lot here that sets it apart from any other Lifetime film.  I mean the opening scene is campy, and the finale (which manages to rip off not only The Shining, but Friday the 13^th) is kind of fun.  However, all the stuff in between is thoroughly middling.  (The scenes of Bane playing junior detective as she tries find Spelling slow things down considerably.)  Still, for someone who enjoys these kinds of things, I was reasonably entertained.

James Franco (of all people) remade it twenty years later. 

AKA:  The Stalker.