"Accused at 17" seems like slow going at first — an incomprehensible set of opening shots, a title reading "Five days earlier," and a plot that for the first half-hour seems like yet another yawn-inducing tale of high-school rivalries and a put-upon heroine (Nicole Gale Anderson) who idealizes her dead father and can't stand the new boyfriend (Jason Brooks, better looking than the anonymous tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys Lifetime usually casts in these parts) of her mom Jacqui (Cynthia Gibb, top-billed). We that at some point the daughter, Bianca, is going to be accused of murder but we don't know whom she's going to kill until one day at a party — which Bianca can't attend because her mom's boyfriend is throwing an elaborate dinner party for them at his home — Bianca's boyfriend Chad (Reiley McClendon) is vamped and seduced by school slut Dory (Lindsay Taylor), giving us the sort of soft-core porn scene that makes a lot of otherwise lame Lifetime movies watchable. Bianca and her friends Fallyn (Janet Montgomery) and Sarah (Stella Maeve) work out a bizarre revenge plot that ends with Dory being bashed in with a rock in a remote canyon. As silly as much of "Accused at 17" is — one gets the impression through much of the first hour that it could just as well have been called "Valley Girls Go Bad" — it takes on power and force when (here comes the spoiler) Fallyn, Dory's actual killer, not only allows Bianca to take the rap but actively frames her for it and, in the film's most chilling scene, murders Sarah by depriving her of her anti-asthma medication just as Sarah is about to go to the police and implicate Fallyn. Janet Montgomery turns in an absolutely chilling performance as a teen girl who quickly descends from adolescent angst to criminal mania; if she keeps this up she'll be a good candidate for modern-day femme fatale roles as she grows up (watch for her!).
Review of Accused at 17
