Gold digging poisoner/femme fatale extraordinaire Victoria (Erika Eleniak) is fresh from her last caper and eying a new one. She adopts a new identity and takes a job in a small town as a schoolteacher.Quickly she targets a wealthy young couple with two children, one of whom is a pupil of hers. She becomes best friends with the wife and her gullible husband and continues to weasel her way into their lives stealthily threatening all that they hold dear. They come to find that the truth about Victoria is much darker than they ever could have imagined but it might be too late.Eleniak was Playboy magazine's Miss July for 1989. Often people define her by that title only. But she is arguably the very best of Playboy Playmates turned Hollywood actresses. In fact she was an actress (Child star) before she ever posed for Playboy. That was her in E.T. getting kissed by Elliott in the classroom scene. In feature film roles like Under Siege and Chasers she was more than passable. In this one however she bit off way more than she could chew and it comes off like a bad caricature.Ex-TV star Patricia Kalember (Thirtysomething) is not very convincing in her role as the wife/heroine. She does not play the role as the classic passive victim we are used to seeing in movies. Her own pro-activeness actually gets her into trouble and allows her to shape the plot.But she seems to look down upon the material here as well as the production itself. I do not just find her unconvincing as the character she plays. I actually think her distaste for the work she has settled for in this drek comes through despite whatever professional face she may have put on during shooting. She looks like she knows this one was headed direct to video or cable. Could she have known where it really did end up? Specifically, it is being marketed as a discount item for sale in dollar stores by an outfit known as Direct Source Special Products. Can you guess what price it commands? This looks like a TV movie and plays much like any movie of the week has but particularly like the not very good ones. It gives you some idea of why TV movies of the week are looked down on by audiences and often snubbed by actors who are offered roles in them.The controversial subject matter designed to win over audiences is another one of those Hollywood thriller clichés. Eleniak's character is to teachers here what Glenn Close was to mistresses in Fatal Attraction.As in other movies made for the small screen much of what is shown is sanitized, the supporting characters are played by no-name actors and the location is British Columbia doubling for the American Pacific Northwest. Casting was actually key in producing the dud that this turned out to be. The no-name actors in supporting roles are no-names for a reason. A non-descript guy portraying a Floridian victim of the title temptress spouts off his lines with an unmistakable Canadian accent.

This is one of those movies you force yourself to watch till the end hoping it will get better. It never does.We are expected to believe that a reasonably intelligent woman suddenly mistrusts her best friend of several years and blindly follows a total strangers lies. Seems like the only smart one in the family is the dog; to bad he gets killed off in the very beginning. As usual in movies like this one, doctor hubby thinks wife is going crazy. But that doesn't stop him from going on a trip at the most crucial time. Ending is your typical victim discovers the truth and has to save the family. If you have nothing better to do, go ahead and watch it. But don't say I didn't warn you when you get to the end and say "you've got to be kidding me!"

. . . is that you often end up cheering for the villain. (Well, at least I do.) "The Good Teacher" is no exception. What makes it mildly interesting is that as the killer's psychosis is presented as a fait accompli -- from her first scenes, the audience knows she's a predatory lunatic and the film's mildest suspense and dramatic irony is generated by how long it takes for the intended victims to figure it out. However, the psycho, as played by Erica Eleniak, is so brittle and blatantly manipulative that the rest of the characters have to be thoroughgoing dimwits to figure it out. And Jesus, they are -- every stalker should have such clueless prey. The good doctor, his devoted wife and cute children (the boy who plays the pre-teen son may be the worst child actor in history) are so damn gullible you start to think they deserve their impending doom. Erica Eleniak isn't great, but she's at least entertaining, especially in a semi-comic episode where she picks up a loser in a bar and takes him back to her hotel room for a little "rough sex" that gets a little too rough. The rest of the cast seems pretty zombified, except for the too-smart neighbor and a cute dog that, of course, meets an unfortunate end (why do the makers of these movies hate animals so much?). Mild, mindless entertainment that's almost as much fun to ridicule as it is to watch.

And I don't mean the villain . This is a movie about a woman who all of a sudden befriends her daughters teacher. The new friend has a "I can't stand to see a family happy complex". So of course she goes out to destroy her family. This movie really bothered me because we have to suspend belief. We have to believe a wife of a doctor a fairly intelligent woman is going to not know something is very wrong with her new friend when things start happening right after she meets her. You see this new friend has a special tea she concocted and gave it to the Patricia Kalember character. This tea makes people forget things that they are suppose to do. So now we have this seemingly smart women forgetting all types of things and acting weird. But not only that she gives her family poison for dinner. Her hubby who before that seems like a blithering idiot decides to test the salad and finds poison is in it. Instead of sending her straight to get some counseling he takes a trip. Oh and the family dog ends up dead. But the most ridiculous thing about this flick is that instead of connecting the dots to the new friend she connects it to her trusty best friend. Even after her husband said her best friend would not do anything to her. They evidently have been best friends for years so all of a sudden the best friend is going to do terrible things to her including having a affair with her husband for no reason. Then she believes this strange man who knows about her new friends past but when he tells her he doesn't really know about her best friend she thinks that he is talking about her real best friend! Mind you the real best friend and her have not been talking now for a while. Or and of course the sociopath writes everything down. So we know sooner or later it is going to be read. The end is very predictable. She soon figures out that the new best friend is a nut it is very anti-climatic because she has read the plans her friend had wrote down. When she finally goes and apologizes to her real friend the friend accepts her apology. I am all for forgiveness but this women all through the movie disregarded her friendship with her best friend even against protests from her husband and let a newbie come in and take over. I would of told her forget about it because I would be weary of what would happen next time she met a new friend. THe actors do what they can with the script. But like I said one has to suspend belief to really feel any suspense, which is OK as long as the movie is Science Fiction, which this is not. I had no sympathy for the so called victim because of how she was so ready to blame everything on a long time trusted friend. I actually was rooting for the villain. Oh and why didn't anyone else in that family drink that ice tea? It was right in the refrigerator.