Film / The Bride He Bought Online

The Bride He Bought Online (also called Flirting With Madness) is a 2015 Lifetime Movie of the Week Thriller written and directed by Christine Conradt, marking the directorial debut of Conradt, who'd written dozens of Lifetime movies dating back to 2001.

The story starts with three close-knit Southern California high school seniors: Avery (Anne Winters), Kaley (Annalisa Cochrane) and Mandy (Lauren Gaw). They run a popular anonymous blog focused on pranks, with Kaley especially taking the initiative in organizing them. Kaley's latest plan is to set up a fake profile for a Filipina woman on a Mail-Order Bride website to see if anyone responds. Someone does: John (Travis Hammer), a socially awkward IT worker who happens to live close by. After sending him messages and accepting his money, the girls follow him to the airport to film his humiliation when "Diwata" fails to arrive from Manila, though Avery and, to a lesser extent Mandy, aren't entirely comfortable with the situation. Devastated, John uses his computer skills to identify the girls, and comes up with a plan for revenge, also based around catfishing. But as the plan takes a criminal turn, it's up to Det. Kathy Schumaker (Alexandra Paul) to sort things out.

The Bride He Bought Online contains examples of:

• Alpha Bitch: Conceited, cruel Kaley almost seems like she took notes from Regina George herself. She's rude to pretty much anyone who isn't her friend, and she revels in catfishing John, constantly mocking him as an ugly loser, even taunting him along these lines after he's tied her up in the warehouse.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: An unusual Played for Horror example, as the possibility that John might try to rape the girls hovers over all the warehouse scenes. John makes creepy passes at Avery and Kaley, and Kaley even flat-out accuses him of wanting to do this, but ultimately nothing happens.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Kaley says she doesn't want to go to college. She won't, since she's being held by Human Traffickers.
• Black Comedy: It's darkly humorous that Kaley ends up naively falling for a fictitious person the same way John did with her prank.
• Catfishing: The girls (but mainly Kaley) pretend to be a woman from the Philippines and gladly accept John's money, all as a prank. For revenge, John hires a hunky male prostitute to befriend the girls (but again, mainly Kaley), then ghost them at a skate park.
• Dead Person Impersonation: As if she wasn't already terrible enough, it turns out that Kaley used the photos of a Filipina model who died in a car accident (named Crystela) for "Diwata".
• Disproportionate Retribution: Up until the skate park scene, John's revenge scheme is intense, but still tit-for-tat in responding to a catfishing with a catfishing, but then he adbucts the girls one by one, ties them up, and tries to sell them to sex traffickers, succeeding in doing so with Kaley.
• Downer Ending: The story ends with John killing himself, and Kaley stranded somewhere in the world of sex trafficking, and even if she gets rescued, she's still guilty of fraud for taking John's money, and likely would face charges for it.
• Extreme Doormat: John seems to be one for women in general, explaining why he's looking for a Mail-Order Bride to begin with. Besides what the teens pull on him, his neighbor Wanda would rather have him pay her for sex than befriend him, and his misogynistic rant in the warehouse suggests that he's had some bad dating experiences with the Master of the Mixed Message.
• Formerly Fat: Mandy's backstory, with the implication that she tolerates Kaley's nasty behavior for fear of abandonment.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: In her final narration, Avery affirms that while it was wrong for her and her friends to pull such a cruel prank on John, it didn't justify the revenge plot he enacted on them in return.
• Girlfriend in Canada: Jealous of his co-workers' sex lives, John brags to them about Diwata, and offers to pay her way to California so they can see her in person, thus unwittingly escalating the girls' prank on him.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: A rare case of a Lifetime movie without clear-cut heroes or villains, making it one of the channel's darkest movies, and very controversial among Lifetime viewers. You definitely feel awful for John after what the girls did to him, but for revenge he does some truly despicable things. And yet, at times you can tell that he's aware that he got carried away with the revenge scheme and is in way over his head, which prevents us from seeing him as completely evil. His final scene is heartbreaking. Meanwhile, Kaley is just a horrible excuse for a human being, and her callousness toward John is sickening. But she certainly didn't deserve to become a victim of Human Trafficking. The "good" member of the group, Avery, tells Kaley off, but never actually does anything to stop her, and Mandy is extremely wishy-washy.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Wanda, who otherwise doesn't seem too friendly with John, briefly shows concern when she sees he's bleeding. She also attempts to save Avery and Mandy after learning what John has been up to.
• Informed Deformity: Kaley calls John a "total loser", "big nerd" and "ugly". He's played by Travis Hammer◊. Granted, the film de-glams him into being slovenly and creepy, but still...Avery even Lampshades it a bit.
  Avery: Wow, he's really...(slight eye roll and dry sarcasm) gross.
• Leg Focus: All the girls, but especially Kaley, who wears shorts throughout the whole movie.
• Mail-Order Bride: The plot is kicked into motion when Kaley finds a website called BeautifulAndLovelyBrides.com.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Kaley taunts John along these lines after he ties her up in the warehouse, with a side of Virgin-Shaming.
  Kaley: So why'd you bring us here? So you can sleep with us? So you can finally experience having sex with something other than your hand?
• Mistaken for Gay: The male prostitute John hires to catfish the girls initially assumes he was hired for his services before John explains that he was actually hired to help him "pull a prank on his niece."
• Never Trust a Title: The title makes you think that the protagonist is going to be a Mail-Order Bride, but the bride doesn't actually exist.
• Nice Mean And In Between: The three teenage protagonists. Kaley is the Mean, spending much of her screen-time as an unrepentant Alpha Bitch prankster. Avery is the Nice, as while she certainly could've done more to stop her, she's consistently opposed to Kaley's nasty pranks and tells her off about it on numerous occasions—seemingly to the point of being willing to end their friendship if she doesn't stop. That leaves Mandy as the in-between, as while she's an overall nice girl who also isn't too comfortable with Kaley's actions, she's demonstrably less willing to stand up to her than Avery is.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Wanda's attempt to rescue Avery and Mandy from John ultimately ends with them being fatally shot by the latter.
• The Oldest Profession: Wanda, who lives across the street from John, is a prostitute and blatantly tries to entice him into using her services. Later, Kaley presumably ends up as a prostitute after John sells her to sex traffickers.
• Porn Stash: In preparation for meeting "Diwata", John throws away his girlie mags.
• Riddle for the Ages: Where did Kaley end up? After the movie's debut there was speculation that the lack of resolution for that subplot was a Sequel Hook, but a sequel was never made. Stolen from the Suburbs, about a blonde teen girl's ordeal in the world of Human Trafficking, which debuted about a month later on Lifetime, might be considered a spiritual sequel.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: One of Diwata's texts to John is the "what did the fish say when it hit the wall?" joke, which, as one blog put it, made it look like John was sexting with Fozzie Bear.
• Spiteful Spit: Kaley does this to John while taunting him after he's abducted her and her friends.
• Teens Are Monsters: Kaley, enabled by Avery and Mandy, devotes a whole website to playing cruel pranks on people, and catfishes John for one of them, with zero remorse.
• Token Minority: Korean-American Mandy, whose memories of being the outcast "fat kid who brings kimchi in her lunch" before she befriended Kaley seemingly motivate her loyalty to Kaley.
• Torture Porn: Probably the closest you could get to this on Lifetime, as John eventually kidnaps the girls, bounds and gags them, and traps them in an abandoned warehouse, with tension over what exactly he's planning to do with them.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Christine Conradt, who holds a master's degree in criminology, says the movie isn't based on any single specific case, but that she borrowed some elements from a few real life incidents for the story. Some have also likened John to mass murderer Elliot Rodger (not crimewise, but similarly being a social misfit with toxic opinions about women).
• Wild Teen Party: Avery hosts a hastily-arranged one at her house while her mom's out of town, goaded into it by Kaley, so they can invite Nick (the prostitute John hired to catfish them).
• Would Hit a Girl: John knocks Mandy out with a blow to the head when abducting her, and Kaley is slapped in the face by the human traffickers John sells her to.
• You No Take Candle: "Diwata" talks this way in her messages to John, which he seems to find endearing. He also buys some English lesson books for her. He and Kaley may not be aware that English is an official language of the Philippines, and almost all of the country can speak it fluently.