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Pat Allanson

November 15, 2009 by · Comments Off on Pat Allanson 

Gina Gershon, of the remarkable face and fantastic form, is in top form in tonight and tomorrow’s two-part original Lifetime movie, “Anne Rule’s Everything She Ever Wanted.”

It’s from a true-crime book from — yes, you guessed it — Ann Rule. Even though the real story began in 1974, the producers have managed to keep it from looking like a music video of “The Village People,” even though Gershon’s Pat Allanson, a murderous gold digger-of-a-Georgia peach pit, loved to dress in costume and would have fit right in.
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Anyway, the story begins right after divorcee Pat hooks up with and marries a younger man, Tom Allanson (Ryan McPartlin), who’d just left his wife and child for the sexed-up Pat.
Because Tom’s father, Walter (Victor Garber), is the richest lawyer in their small Southern town, larcenous, lascivious Pat figures she’s finally hit the big time and is determined to live like Scarlett O’Hara.

Pat, a woman ahead of her time, would have, it turns out, made a perfect addition to “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” with her over-the-top need to be a “socialite” — without a clue that anyone with any honest social ties would always reject her as trash.

In fact, in a misguided attempt to recreate the society she thinks she belongs in, she and Tom dress as Scarlett and Rhett for their wedding, arriving in a horse-drawn carriage much to the smug amusement of most of their guests.

Pat, who seemingly doesn’t have a good or kind bone in her body, right off gets into it with Tom’s father and then goads the younger Allanson into violence against the mean older man, going so far as to say that the elder Allanson tried to rape her.

During a summer holiday town picnic, Pat drags Tom into their truck to have sex in the parking lot, and then Tom goes to his parents’ house, even though his father said publicly that he wants to kill the son, and ends up killing his father and his mother. But no money’s forthcoming, so in a very short time, Tom’s loving grandparents who helped Tom and Pat buy their dream plantation, get horribly sick (arsenic), and one of them even dies — leaving Pat as the obvious culprit.

If you want to know the rest of the lurid tale, you’ll just have to watch the movie. After getting out of jail, the still-sexy Pat becomes (I swear) a home-health aide to a rich and very social quadriplegic married man, whose wife — oh no! — dies of a mysterious illness and, well, you get it.

Gershon is campy perfection as the crazy, deadly Southern belle who loves nothing better than arsenic and old lace — or make that old arsenic-laced drinks.

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