Trudee (l) and Marcia (r)
Deadly Garage Sale is a 2022 Lifetime Crime Drama/Thriller, directed by Doug Campbell, with a screenplay by Barbara Arsenault.
Trudee Smith (Juliana Destefano) is a budding young SoCal Con Artist, in tandem with her brother Pete (Christian Seavey), who's hit on a scheme to steal money from homeowners holding garage sales. An attempted heist at a sale held by Marcia Clattenburg (Aryè Campos) ends up with Pete dead and Trudee hungry for vengeance. She decides to play the long game by befriending Marcia, feigning a love for garage sales and swap meets. But Marcia's daughter Candice (Autumn Noel), a student journalist and vlogger who's already embarrassed by Marcia's many garage sales and hoarder ways, is suspicious of this new woman who's suddenly burst in her mother's life, and for good reason: Trudee has some genuinely nasty plans up her sleeve. In the middle of all this, Marcia strikes up a whirlwind romance with Rick (Matt Pohlkamp), a handsome customer who shows up at one of her garage sales. Perhaps a bit too whirlwind, as it turns out...
Deadly Garage Sale contains examples of:
- Artistic License – Economics: In Real Life, a complete transfer of nearly $80,000 from a savings account initiated online at night almost certainly would lead the bank to contact the account holder offline to confirm the authenticity of the request, which would've totally sunk Trudee's scheme.
- Asshole Victim: Evelyn, the catty rep from the homeowner's association who harasses Marcia about her garage sales, is throroughly unlikable, so her ultimate fate—Trudee fatally stabbing her with Candice's scissors—isn't too sad for the viewer.
- Batman Gambit: After catching on that Trudee is Pete's sister, Marcia decides to Speak Ill of the Dead to agitate her, suggesting that Pete deserved to die. As expected, Trudee doesn't take this very well.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Candice, of the Deadpan Snarker variety, constantly subjecting the Cloudcuckoolanderish Marcia to eye-rolling sarcasm.
- Chekhov's Gun: Candice shows Marcia how to livestream video at the start of the movie. Marcia does this when she follows Trudee, and her viewers call the cops when Trudee and Rick catch her and tie her up.
- Clear My Name: Candice gets falsely arrested for the murder of Evelyn, and Marcia tries to do this for her.
- Con Artist: Trudee and Pete are siblings who participate in crimes together and their estranged father Rick is a con man as well.
- Cut-and-Paste Suburb: The Clattenburgs live in one, complete with a Tyrannical Homeowners' Association..
- Cute and Psycho: Trudee is a cheerful Genki Girl who quickly becomes good friends with Marcia. However, we see what the Clattenburgs don't; she's really a psychopathic criminal with a huge dark side.
- Death by Falling Over: The staircase in the Clattenburg house is a completely straight one of maybe ten steps, which should probably at the most have caused some broken bones and maybe a concussion to Pete when he tumbled down to the bottom, but instead it killed him.
- Decoy Protagonist: At first it looks like we're going to follow the criminal exploits of Pete and Trudee, but Pete is killed off after a few minutes.
- Did You Just Have Sex?: Candice comes back home in the morning from her slumber party to find Rick walking out to his car and Marcia looking a bit disheveled, drawing the obvious conclusions about what happened the night before.
- Disappeared Dad: This is Trudee's backstory, with a father who left the family while her mother became a drug addict. Rick is her father.
- Distracted by the Sexy: The guy holding the garage sale in the opening scene ignores his money box when Trudee, clad in a bare midriff top and jean shorts, catches his eye, allowing Pete to steal it.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Rick, a Con Artist who slept with a woman so his daughter could steal the entire college fund of the woman's daughter is flabbergasted that Trudee is starting to include murder in her scheme, warning her that con artists should only be worried about the money.
- Fake-Out Opening: The first scene, where a creepy, pervy guy holding a garage sale invites Trudee into his house to look at a lamp and seems poised to assault her, makes us think he's going to be the villain and Trudee will be The Ingenue heroine. Instead, he's the first victim of her garage sale con.
- Foster Kid: Candice is actually a foster daughter that Marcia adopted, though it's downplayed up until Candice gets arrested.
- Frame-Up: At one point we see Trudee steal Candice's scissors, establishing that she might try to frame Candice for something. She ultimately does so for the murder of Evelyn from the homeowner's association.
- Genre Savvy: Candice seems to be vaguely aware of the conventions of a Lifetime thriller, namely that a mysterious stranger who manipulates herself into the life of a single mom might have some sinister intentions. This becomes major subtext in the scene where Trudee pulls her away from the garage sale for a private conversation in her car. Candice is afraid that Trudee will kidnap/kill her, and when she admits this to Trudee, Trudee laughs it off but adds "I love your ideas." Candice also gives Marcia a What the Hell, Hero? speech when she sleeps with Rick, seemingly recognizing how much it clashed with the typical prudishness of a Lifetime movie mom.
- Here We Go Again!: After Candice is vindicated and Marcia keeps a promise to clean the junk out of their house, she horrifies Candice by suggesting they go to a swap meet to celebrate.
- In the Style of: Showing how self-referential the world of Lifetime movies is, this comes off as Doug Campbell doing his take on David DeCoteau's brand of Lifetime movie, with the SoCal setting, a ditzy heroine, a hunky guy and a Cute and Psycho female villain. If you added Vivica A. Fox as the next door neighbor, this could easily end up being called something like The Wrong Shopping Buddy or The Wrong Gal Pal.
- Incest Subtext: Trudee and Pete seem awfully close for a brother and sister. She reacts to his death the way someone would react to losing a lover, lamenting that she feels alone without him.
- Intergenerational Friendship: Middle-aged Marcia and twentysomething Trudee.
- Ivy League for Everyone: West Coast variation, as Candice aspires to go to Stanford or UC Berkeley. Surprisingly for a Johnson Production Group Lifetime movie, there's no mention of Whittendale College.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Candice comes off a bit self-righteous after catching Marcia with Rick and scolding her for jumping into bed with a guy she barely knows, but Candice rightly points out that Marcia would've punished her severely if she pulled the same shenanigans. Marcia weakly argues that she's been celibate for eight years and needed to take the opportunity when it arose.
- Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Marcia (Light) is blonde, bubbly and a bit ditzy; Trudee (Dark) is brunette, intense and vindictive.
- Ms. Fanservice: Trudee is a dark-haired beauty with a penchant for revealing outfits, and the camera takes a few opportunities to show its admiration for her. She even strips to her underwear for the murder scene.
- Nice Guy: Rick, a wealthy ex-Silicon Valley exec who shows up at Marcia's garage sale to buy Christmas decorations for his sister's family. Awwww....He's actually Trudee's father and a skilled Con Artist who she's recruited to help her get Marcia's money.
- One Dialogue, Two Conversations: When Trudee tells Marcia about how she lost the "man in her life", Marcia just thinks she's talking about an ex, but Trudee is really describing Pete's death and blaming Marcia for it right to her face.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: After a first act that sets the movie up as a Thriller, Rick shows up and his scenes with Marcia at the garage sale feel like they ripped a few pages from the screenplay of a Hallmark Channel Christmas RomCom and stapled them into the script. Thankfully, it turns out to be the setup for a Plot Twist.
- Police Are Useless: Det. West isn't much help in trying to recover the money after it's stolen from Candice's college account, but, as he points out, he's a homicide detective and has no experience dealing with fraud. However, his credentials as a homicide detective are later shown to be questionable too, since he arrests Candice even though forensic investigation should've discovered glove prints on Candice's scissors, suggesting she wasn't the last to use them, and the blood stains at the Clattenburg house showing telltale signs of having been smeared there.
- The Reveal: Trudee and Pete are siblings (at first we're led to believe that they're lovers), then Rick is Trudee's father.
- Revenge: Pete dies after slipping down the stairs when Marcia catches him robbing her house. Trudee assumes Marcia pushed him, and decides to completely ruin Marcia's life, even when she's warned that she's taking things too personally.
- Self-Plagiarism:
- It's a Doug Campbell movie, so this naturally happens. Trudee is an Expy of Gina from Stalked By My Mother (right down to stealing scissors from a teen girl's bedroom),note while the climax is basically a rewrite of the climax from Dirty Teacher. Most tellingly, though, is how the entire premise takes inspiration from Campbell's 2012 thriller Home Invasion, which also follows a serial burglar's loved one plotting to take revenge on a woman who killed them in self-defense (a key difference being that the loved one in this case is a sister instead of a girlfriend like in Home Invasion.)
- Campbell and Destefano reunited for Look Who's Stalking in 2023, in which she once again played a character who tries to avenge her brother's death by befriending the woman she blames for it and messing up her life.
- Shopping Montage: After striking up a friendship, Marcia and Trudee go out to the Saugus Swap Meet
together and one of these ensues. - So Much for Stealth: In the climax, Marcia hides in Trudee's house and overhears her plotting with Rick, only to have the homeowner's association send her a reminder alert on her phone about paying dues, which blows her cover.
- Tyrannical Homeowners' Association: The neighborhood association hates Marcia's frequent garage sales, and sends Evelyn over to harass her about them.
- Villain Over for Dinner: Trudee bases her whole plot against Marcia around becoming her good friend and inserting herself into Marcia's life, to the confusion and vague disgust of Candice.
- Villain Protagonist: Marcia's actress gets top billing, but Trudee is clearly the movie's lead.
- Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Marcia is a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander, obsessed with hoarding and garage sales, which annoys the more levelheaded Candice.
