The best character in this story is the father as he is never seen, described as an ogre for walking out on the mother and her daughters.

This lunatic happened to apply for a substitute teaching position for English in the school where the girl just happened to attend?

The story begins with the rebelliousness of the girl, cutting classes and going around with a boy that mother disapproves of. Of course, the lad is soon killed in a shark attack and the fiend witnesses this and comes along just in time to rescue our fair maiden. He becomes obsessed with her since she reminds him of a former girlfriend, who died in a car accident four years before thanks to him, when she wanted to break off their relationship.

This character is politically connected but his parents present a low profile in the film which turns out to be the best for them.

He starts following her around and eventually shows his violent tendencies. You just know that the shark will play a role by film's end. In classroom stint talking about Hester Prynne was ridiculous. Rate that lesson unsatisfactory and the picture in itself doesn't fall much behind.

The first of last night's two Lifetime "premiere" movies was "Stalker's Prey," listed on IMDb.com as "Hunter's Cove" (presumably a working title, since Hunter's Cove is the name of the beach town where it takes place). Directed by Colin Theys from a script by John Doolan, it's a pretty typical by-the-numbers Lifetime piece in which high-school senior Laura Wilcox (Saxon Sharbino) and her younger sister Chloe (Alexis Larivere) are being raised by their mom Sandy (Cynthia Gibb) as a single parent. Dad is still alive but he hovers over the action as a sort of irritating non-presence and is never seen as a character, though at one point an argument between Sandy and Laura establishes that it was their father who left their mom, not the other way around. In the opening scene, we see Laura and her boyfriend Nicholas Jordan (Luke Slattery) making out and getting ready to have sex in Nicholas's pickup truck — a real cool restored oldie with a double cab — when mom comes home early from an outing and catches them. She orders Laura into the house and tells her she's not to see Nicholas anymore — it becomes clear she just plain doesn't like him and doesn't regard him as a suitable mate for her daughter — and when she resists, Sandy tells Laura she's grounded for the weekend even though it's her birthday and she was counting on being able to go out to celebrate. Laura duly sneaks out, and equally unsurprisingly her sister Chloe rats her out to mom; where Laura is going is to the local beach with her friend Bre Hendricks (Gillian Rose) — the first name is pronounced "Brie," like the cheese — and the two end up on a boat called "Open Wide" (as in what, Laura's legs?), from which they dive to do a swim in the local cove.

Only there's a shark prowling the water (and director Theys can't resist some vaguely "Jaws"-ish musical themes while this is happening) and it attacks our young lovebirds: Nicholas is killed by the shark (a real pity because we don't want to lose the cutest guy in the film at the end of the first act!) but Laura is rescued by Bruce Kane (Mason Dye), of whom we'd also got some choice man-meat views in swim trunks and nothing else. The gimmick is that once Bruce, the son of a local City Councilmember, sees Laura he's instantly smitten and believes she is THE ONE for him from then on — and this being a stalker story his affections get creepier and creepier, including taking on a job baby-sitting for Laura's sister Chloe and getting a key to their house, ostensibly so he can show up whenever Sandy needs a baby-sitter but really to show up whenever he wants Laura — whom he makes it to bed with once (at a garden party given by his dad to raise money for his re-election campaign — Bruce tricks Laura into going by saying he merely wants an escort but he turns it into a real date, necking with her by the backyard swimming pool to the strains of the 1913 song "You Made Me Love You" (I wasn't sure, but I think the singer was Patsy Cline) and ultimately having sex with her. As the film progresses (like a disease), Bruce's actions get weirder and weirder.

The big problem with "Stalker's Prey" is the big problem with a lot of Lifetime's thrillers: not content to keep Bruce's villainy within reasonable and believable bounds, writer Doolan makes him a figure of almost preternatural evil. At times the moral of this story seems to be, "When your mom grounds you because she doesn't like your boyfriend, listen to her: otherwise, if you sneak out, he's going to be killed by a shark and you'll be rescued by a cute guy who'll become an obsessive stalker and threaten to kill you" — though one part of Doolan's script I liked was the irony that Laura's mom can't stand the nice boy she's dating at the opening and loves the one who turns out to be the demented stalker who nearly kills her. Other than that, "Stalker's Prey" was pretty typical Lifetime fare, blessed with two cute guys we get to see in hot states of undress but preceding along well-traveled routes to a pretty predictable ending.

One predator is the shark circling the waters. But the other predator is young Bruce Kane, who can be equally deadly as his animal counterpart in the melodramatic "Stalker's Prey."

Laura Wilcox is out for a birthday excursion, sailing on Hunter's Cove with her boyfriend Nate. When the pair goes for a dip, Laura and Nate are attacked by a shark. While Nate perishes, Laura is rescued by Bruce Kane, who subsequently receives headlines as the local hero.

The son of a politician, Bruce also has a hidden past. His last girlfriend, Allison, died in a car that he was driving at excessive speed because he was having a meltdown when she broke off their relationship. Now, Bruce finds that the young woman he rescued bears an uncanny resemblance to Allison. He then proceeds to stalk Laura, and nothing appears to stand in his shark-like ways.

The film was overly unpleasant with unnecessary violence. Bruce is so obsessed with Laura that he nearly runs over her bestie Bre, and we never even learn if she survives. Bruce also murders Laura's pal Parker, after nearly pulverizing him with a baseball bat.

There was also the stretching of credibility far beyond the pale when the English teacher, Mr. Alves, takes a bad fall, then just happens to be replaced by Bruce at Hunter's Cover High School. It was also unconvincing that Laura's mother Sandy would not listen to her daughter's warnings about Bruce's strange behavior, and the mom actually gave him a key to the house!

It was initially a bad sign to Laura when Bruce inadvertently addressed her as "Ali." It was even worse when she overheard him in an intimate phone conversation with Ali. It was ultra serious when Laura learned that Ali was dead! One of the best moments in the film was when Laura took the blue dress given to her by Bruce and dumped it into the trash bin.

Like Captain Ahab's relentless pursuit of the white whale Moby Dick, it was inevitable that Bruce Kane would eventually have his confrontation with his shark. When Bruce eventually takes the plunge into the water, the meeting of two kindred animal spirits seems inevitable. If not the stuff of legend, Bruce Kane will at least be the stuff of a late-night snack. When he taught the class at Hunter's Cove High School, the subject was Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter." Instead of wearing the letter "A" for adultery, the best letter to be branded on Bruce was the letter "P" for predator.