Perfect cast and a good story

Good movie but grossly overrated

Absolutely Fantastic

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

How this movie made it beyond 4 is beyond me. Not one watchable or believable scene, pathetic direction, can't blame the actors for the otherwise sordid movie this is. The screenplay writer needs to be sent to Syria before he/she releases the next one. Even Asylum movies are better than this - wait I didnt check if this was by them b4 I wrote this so the joke might be on me

I've never seen a Lifetime Chanel film before, but I've heard them mocked as poorly made thrillers typical featuring women in peril. That pretty much sums "Fatal Defense." I'd set a series recording on my DVR to record anything that Sherilyn Fenn is in and this made-for-cable film showed up, so I gave it a watch. Fenn wasn't the main character. That would be a pretty blond haired single mom, Ashley Scott ("Into the Blue" and "Jericho"), who signs up for a self defense class and is charmed by the handsome instructor. But guess what? He's a psycho and goal all Fatal Attraction on her. Fenn has a supporting role as a police detective trying to help Scott. Ridiculous dialogue, poorly constructed suspense, laughable action sequences, and general incredulity abound. One star for Fenn and Scott, who are better than this dreck.

What were the producers of this extended music video thinking? The not particularly good music was incessantly oppressive from start to finish; 86 minutes of continuous acoustic assault. For the first time that I can recollect, I was actually looking forward to the commercial breaks, as they provided some much needed respite.It wasn't even background noise, and while it never quite overwhelmed the actors' delivery of their respective lines, it was certainly a significant distraction. Then again, given the poor quality of the script, and indeed the entire screenplay, maybe this was deliberate.The only redeeming quality, it makes one appreciate the beauty of silence.

The first of Lifetime's "premiere" movies April 1 was one of the worst things I've ever seen on the network! Judging from the title, "Fatal Defense," I was expecting a story in which a woman defense attorney gets a man acquitted of a terrible crime, then realizes he's actually guilty and tries to nail him for something else, while of course he finds out and tries to kill her. No such luck: instead it was a story of a woman, Arden Walsh (Ashley Scott), terrorized by — get this: her martial-arts instructor. Arden is living in a nice suburban home and raising her eight-year-old daughter Emma (Sophie Guest) as a single parent — dad bailed on them for reasons that are never quite explained beyond that he liked to argue and she didn't (he was an attorney and after they broke up he married another lawyer, so Arden jokes that now he gets to argue all the time) — when a burglar in a ski mask breaks into her home when both she and the daughter are there. The burglar brandishes the sort of knife you'd use to cut fish open and take their guts out prior to cooking them, and threatens Arden with it — and Arden hears her sick daughter (she has a cold) asking for a glass of water and tells the burglar she'd better get the girl some water before she gets suspicious. Amazingly, director John Murlowski and writer Steven Palmer Peterson expect us to believe that a) the burglar buys this and lets Arden out of his sight, and b) once out of the burglar's direct control Arden does absolutely nothing (like call the police on her cell phone — this is 2017, after all, so she undoubtedly has one) to get help, while c) the daughter notices nothing wrong until the burglar leaves and Emma finds her mom strapped to a chair with duct tape.Thinking she's actually giving Arden good advice, her sister Gwen (Laurie Fortier) advises her to take a self-defense class, and the instructor turns out to be a muscular hunk named Logan Chase (David Cade). Well, any veteran Lifetime watcher knows what that means: just about every reasonably attractive male in a Lifetime movie turns out to be a black-hearted psycho villain, and Logan is no exception. He runs his class with a visceral intensity and a line of verbal abuse a military drill sergeant might have regarded as too extreme, though instead of picking on Arden he seems to be taking a shine to her and we wonder if he's going to form a demented crush on her. Only the first time they're making eyes at each other and she seems willing to have sex with him, instead of responding as any normal straight male would he grabs her, turns her around and ties her hands behind her back, explaining later that the point of him doing this is to teach her never to let her guard down, no matter how safe she may feel. Later he actually ties her up, kidnaps her and throws her in the trunk of his car, then challenges her to figure out how to escape. Naturally on this one she does complain to the police, but the woman detective investigating the case says that because she signed a release form agreeing to be subjected to his "extreme" training methods, she really doesn't have a case against him — at least not one the authorities would be willing to prosecute. It goes on pretty much like that, with writer Peterson deploying one tired old Lifetime plot device after another to stretch out the running time to two hours. "Fatal Defense" was such a perfect assembly of Lifetime's most risible clichés it achieves a sort of demented perfection on its own, though it's so mind-numbingly predictable and so ineptly written and stage the likely reaction it's going to elicit from anyone is, "Why the hell am I watching this?"