"Party Mom" begins as if it were a comedy about social class and snobbery in Beverly Hills compared to the San Fernando Valley. But at the midpoint, the film switches gears from "Valley Girl" into a full-blown shattering tragedy. At the heart of film is the "party mom," Jackie Anderson, who is responsible for the deaths of three young people and, indirectly, for the death of her own daughter.

The performances were first-rate as the dichotomy was established between the family values of Brittany, her mom Caroline, her dad Gary, an her little sister Emma that are juxtaposed with the alcoholic Jackie, swimming in money and booze.

The first shocking moment of the film was the car crash that took the lives of three of the teenagers who became intoxicated at the party at Jackie's home. Brittany was thrown from the vehicle and survived. Perhaps just as shocking was the "not guilty" verdict rendered by a jury in Jackie's trial.

One of the most interesting characters in the film was Ashley Anderson, the practical and wise young woman who recognizes the gravity of her mother's illness but is helpless to do anything. The saddest moment in the film was the taking of Ashley's life by one of the distraught parents.

The filmmakers tried to walk a tightrope in cinematic styles. While the situations were over the top, the cast nonetheless deserves credit for searching for the truth in their characters and ultimately realizing an unforgettable tragedy in Beverly Hills.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to be so judgmental - even though I usually enjoy them - of the movies shown on the Lifetime Movie Network. The channel cranks these out like professional wrestling matches, so there's inevitably going to be a focus on quantity at the expense of quality. That said, PARTY MOM had the chance to be very interesting viewing, and it mostly failed.

I have to admit, I'm a sucker for movies of this type. I remember really liking the masterful BAD TO THE BONE, which was admittedly not a Lifetime original but was aired on LMN eventually, and which was kind of a combination of the 1944 film-noir classic DOUBLE INDEMNITY and the trashy B-movie series POISON IVY. And FATAL LESSONS: THE GOOD TEACHER was fun, even though Erika Eleniak's character was a completely implausible comic-book supervillain. At their best, these TV movies remind me of the famous "pre-Code" crime thrillers of the early 1930s, which showed gangsters and gold diggers causing all kinds of trouble before eventually suffering some sort of comeuppance. But PARTY MOM was the wrong kind of story for the made-for-TV format, and could have been done much better as a plot thread in a first-rate soap opera. But it never had much of a chance of being an excellent neo-noir crime drama.

Most disappointing of all is the fact that, despite having the name of the "villain" in the title, PARTY MOM is not a CRUELLA-like faux biopic but just another "suburban-family-in-peril" melodrama of the sort we've seen since around the 1950s, which was lame back then and is even lamer now. The beautiful Krista Allen is a scandalous delight as the narcissistic and hedonistic bimbo mother, but we see very little of her throughout the first half of the film. Instead, we have to content ourselves with a number of stereotyped characters, including two strict but loving parents and their naive, semi-rebellious teen daughter. You can see many of the plot points coming from several football fields away. You just know that the daughter is going to sneak away to the party after her parents forbid her to go. It's no surprise when the inebriated teen driver who claims he's "only a little drunk" crashes his car and is killed instantly. And so on.

And when we do get to see Jackie (the bimbo mom),she's intriguing at first...but ultimately a letdown. I didn't expect Jackie to be a master criminal, but they could at least portrayed her as an impulsive maniac. Instead, Jackie turns out to be such a pathetically childish hot mess that she makes Harley Quinn look like a genius. She's funny, and a self-serving weasel, but all of it just doesn't add up. Even worse, the screenplay expects us to actually feel sorry for her, then gives her the standard humiliating villain comeuppance at the end. We're supposed to be happy to see her throwing a whiny tantrum in jail, but because she's been little more than a plot device and a target for contemptuous pity, the ending falls flat. It's not humorous and it brings no satisfaction - and it's a very dark ending when you figure that Jackie is either going to kill herself out of despair or be murdered by one of the other prisoners for being such a nuisance. All in all, faulty characterization and bad writing is what we're left with.

So I advise skipping this one, unless you really adore Krista Allen (who doesn't quite cut it for me personally). Or if you enjoy seeing an "all-American family" triumphing over adversity, even though they're a pack of fools.

This is better than the title would suggest. It's more than just a warning about drunk driving and teen partying. The title character is very convincingly played by the beautiful Krista Allen who does the irresponsible mom perfectly. Watch this.