Despite the fact that I have a national television show which is seen by well over ten people and write for this website which read by tens more, I still don’t get freebies from the various movie studios when they release their flicks. I, like many of you, have a Netflix subscription – which I have to pay for – though you would think one of these online rental outlets would throw a brother a bone of a freebie for some pub, but no… not for me. As such when I place a movie in my lengthy cue that movie won’t reach my doorstep until about four months after being placed in my cue so when that movie does arrive I have no idea what it is about and how it got into my cue in the first place. ‘Framed for Murder’ is a classic example of this. I place this movie in the DVD player and after getting assaulted by the Lionsgate Trailer Attack the movie starts. In almost the first thirty seconds it is obvious that this is one of the Lifetime Movie Network deals as those flicks just have a very unique look and sound to them, which again had me thinking why in the HELL did I stick this in my cue? Nothing personal against the LMN slate of flicks, but I do try to avoid those like the plague, much less request that they be sent to my home. Nonetheless I watch the damn thing, since I did request it, and after viewing it observed that this was an LMN movie to the bone from start to finish, again piquing my interest in how it made it into my cue. Then in preparing this little review I see the box cover. The tagline reads ‘She may not be guilty, but she’s far from innocent.’, and based on that combined with the image on the box cover, and since I check the release date on all new releases, this one made it into my cue since something in my brain convinced me that this looked interesting and of course it made no mention that this was originally an LMN movie. Hoodwinked? Bamboozled? Led astray? Probably, like Lionsgate gives a damn, but since I did rent it and watch, exactly how bad was it?

June (Elisa Donovan) has just smashed her abusive husband over the head with a statue but good. All June wanted to do was grab her infant son and be free of this dude but she swears to the police that he was alive when she fled. Well my man ain’t alive

no more and the bi-polar Jill catches a manslaughter case netting her 8 years in the hoosegow. Now a free woman Jill moves in with her big sister Claire (Susan Waters) and her sour disapproving, but filthy rich husband Jason (Perry King). Her little boy Sammy is 8 now and did visit mom while she was in stripes, though he’s on a field trip or something right now. Thing is June knows for a stone cold fact that she didn’t kill her husband and has advised big sis that she’s going to find out who did kill the dude in the next week or so, which doesn’t please Claire at all. Claire is like the worlds worst big sister and has swapped June’s bi-polar meds with Dristan or something because the last thing she wants June to do is to find out the truth about how her husband really died. Claire is also like the worlds worst wife since she’s doing the landscape dude (Kevin Jubinville) and plotting the murder of her sour husband. This plan is made all the more easy by Claire having the worlds greatest patsy move into the upstairs bedroom. As June gets closer to the truth the body count starts getting high and she’s getting nuttier by the day since Dristan doesn’t do much for bi-polarism, leading her to a truth that she cannot face!

One good thing about the LMN movies is that the titles don’t require you to guess what the movie is about. ‘Betrayed by her Husband’, ‘My Man Lies and Cheats’, ‘She’s Killing her Children’… What is ‘Framed for Murder’ about? Why it’s about a loon getting framed for murder, simple as that. One bad thing about LMN movies, or at least this one is how inanely silly they are. There is no ‘mystery’ here since we‘re told almost right off the bat the Claire is responsible for everything going on, leaving you just sitting there watching this thing for what I guess is entertainment value, of which there is very little. While watching the movie you may wonder why the evil Claire has the lawn dude kill the secretary who basically knows nothing other than she ‘has a big mouth’, but doesn’t waste the bartender who knows basically everything and instead chooses to kill people who the bartender told everything too. You may also wonder what kind of lawyer did June have in the first place that couldn’t help her beat that lazy case she caught. You may wonder why is Lionsgate putting fancy box covers on LMN movies and bamboozling an otherwise unsuspecting public into placing these things in their Netflix cue. These questions and many others will yield you no answers.

On the plus side ‘Framed for Murder’ wasn’t unwatchable, Susan Waters has a fairly awesome rack, Elisa Donovan plays a pretty decent loon and… well… that’s about it. Be on the lookout for the sequel, ‘Framed for Murder…One More Time Again!’