- Lifetime
- Will Ferrell is (mostly) dead serious in A Deadly Adoption.
A week before the Will Ferrell/Kristen Wiig-helmed Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption aired, the network premiered another original movie called I Killed My BFF. (Not to be confused with the Lifetime series I Killed My BFF. So many BFFs are being killed always.) Two women, a young single mom named Heather and a slightly older married one named Shane, meet in a maternity ward after their respective labors and forge a strong and immediate bond. Both of them are fucking nuts, so it’s a race to the finish to find out which one will be the titular BFF murderer (I won’t spoil it). The week before that, Double Daddy made its auspicious debut. A teen boy from a well-to-do family gets date-raped by a delusional girl—also named Heather—from the wrong side of the tracks, who purposely gets pregnant because she has designs on his family’s money. If that weren’t bad enough, he’s also gone and knocked up his kind, pretty girlfriend Amanda! In the movie’s climax, a very pregnant Heather attacks a very pregnant Amanda with a gigantic kitchen knife. They fall off a roughly 12-foot cliff, which sends Heather into labor, leaving Amanda to deliver the attempted murderer’s baby.
It’s not a parody at all, rather a pretty authentic duplication of the Lifetime formula by comedy writer Andrew Steele (SNL, The Spoils of Babylon). There are exploited fears aplenty—the loss of a pregnancy, marital infidelity, the kidnapping of a child—a woman-on-woman physical showdown, and even a tonally off happy-ending dance sequence. Still it felt like Steele played it a little safe to prevent the movie from resembling a parody. It could have been way more ridiculous than it was.
