We suppose we can always count on Lifetime to provide us with some easy entertainment that gets us through the day. Nightmare School Moms isn’t too complicated, but it is fun. Other than Rachel Walters, who very unconvincingly plays Nicole Settle, the entire cast was excellent, and Crystal Allen was simply brilliant as Lacy Settle. This is a recap of Nightmare School Moms for you.
Spoilers Alert
What Does Lacy Do To Get Nicole To Whittendale?
A cake with minimal decoration and writing is either funny or creepy, with no middle ground. It is Drake Settle’s birthday, and his daughter and granddaughter, Lucy and Nicole Settle, bring a cake for him. He doesn’t have the energy to blow it out, but he finds it in himself to hammer home that his granddaughter must get into Whittendale to restart the family tradition that had been broken by his daughter. It is a lot of pressure for Nicole, but she wants to earn her place there, like her grandfather wants her to. She is tied for the top GPA with Parker Williams, and that is a special thorn in the Settles’ side since, years earlier, Lacy had lost Whittendale to Parker’s mother, Mandy.
Lacy is particularly desperate to get Nicole into Whittendale because she believes that it is because she could not go there herself that her life was ruined. Lacy had to go to a regular college and get a regular job. She got involved with a man who abandoned her when she got pregnant, and since then, Lacy has been alone, along with facing her father’s constant taunts for not being able to get to Whittendale. Lacy has really internalized Drake’s words, and she believes that her life would have been way better if Whittendale was a part of it. This is the precise reason she hates Mandy, even though they used to be friends before because she thinks Mandy somehow stole it from her. There is no objectivity here, and we honestly think that this is some sort of trauma response to the bullying by her father. Lacy is convinced that if her daughter is not able to go to that particular college, her life would be just as terrible, and she is willing to go to any extent to prevent that from happening.
Right now, since Parker and Nicole have similar grades, Nicole must excel in the extracurriculars if she wants to have an advantage over Parker. Therefore, Lacy wants her to win the school president elections, which would put her in the lead. Sadly, Parker wins that one, and Lacy decides to take matters into her own hands. She makes Nicole ask for a recount, and Lacy comes up with a plan to rig the votes. She steals the ballot paper and increases the votes for Nicole by putting the pages through a Xerox machine. But she is unable to make the actual switch, and Parker ends up winning again, this time by finding that she got more votes than had initially been counted.
A humiliated Nicole asks her mother to stop pushing her more; therefore, Lacy meets her father and asks him to make a phone call to Whittendale to secure Nicole’s place. When Drake refuses to do that, an exasperated Lacy decides not to change his oxygen cylinder, enabling him to breathe his last. Frankly, this should have meant that Lacy no longer had to fight for her father’s approval and that she and her daughter could live in peace. But as we said before, Lacy believed that her father was right and that Nicole could only have a good future if she went to Whittendale. Therefore, she enrolls Nicole in a private tutoring center so that she can retake her CTE and increase her test scores.
The mother and daughter really jump into the preparation, but when Nicole starts doing even worse due to the pressure, Lacy pulls some strings to push the date of the exam. She promises Bill Yellen, the man in charge of the tutoring center, some explicit favors if he is able to get Nicole to take the exam at a later date. Bill comes through with it, but the next date is the day after the year-end party at school. Nicole should ideally miss it, but she ends up sneaking out and ends up drunk, with Parker taking care of her. The next day, Nicole is extremely nauseous and is in no state to give the test. As usual, Lacy is unreasonable and hostile towards Mandy, who was just trying to help, and she wants Nicole to gear up for the test. When Nicole says that she won’t be able to do that, Lacy gets the idea to give the test in place of her daughter by dressing up like her. She almost got away with it, except that Bill Yellen and the invigilator noticed something. They did not raise the alarm, but Bill got the picture, which he used to blackmail Lacy for the promised favor and a sum of $10,000.
In school, when Nicole’s test results are announced, and she has scored stunningly, Parker is a little suspicious since she knew the state Nicole was in on the morning of her test. When she tells this to Mandy, even she decides to check it out and meets Bill Yellen, who suggests those very favors when he hears that she is a friend of Lacy’s. Mandy is disgusted and walks out, but when Bill meets Lacy and tells her this, she is furious since she knows that Mandy might not stop investigating. Hearing this, Bill asks Lacy for more money to keep up the facade, and knowing that this would be a never-ending cycle, she ends up killing him.
Everything is pretty much set for Nicole to get into Whittendale, except that her GPA suffers as she had no time to study for her school subjects since she was busy with her CTE. This once again puts Parker in the lead, and this time, Lacy has no choice but to attack her. She plants some drugs on her, which ends up getting Parker suspended and placing her on the verge of expulsion.
‘Nightmare School Moms’ Ending Explained: Does Nicole Go To Whittendale?
Mandy finally steps in to take charge of the matter. The reason they had come back to the town was because she had a heart condition and was told not to take on too much stress. But now that her daughter’s future is at stake, Mandy has to get up and go again. She finds out from the principal that they had investigated the issue due to an email claiming that honor students were carrying drugs. Mandy goes to the coffee shop, where Parker told her that she had left her bag unattended for a few minutes. Upon checking the CCTV footage, she found a person in a red hoodie placing the drugs in Parker’s bag. That is enough proof to show that Parker is innocent.
In the meantime, the police come knocking on Mandy’s door, asking about Bill Yellen, and she tells them that she suspects that Lacy was romantically involved with him. When the police go to Lacy’s house, she denies everything, but what alerts Nicole is the fact that Lacy lied about her alibi that night.
The next day, when Lacy and Nicole go to meet the Whittendale representative, they find Mandy and Parker already there. Lacy loses it when she finds that Parker has been proven innocent and is very close to losing her composure when Nicole admits that she never took her CTE test, but Lacy did that in her place. Mandy puts two and two together and figures out that Lacy was also the one to plant the drugs on Parker. Lacy completely blows up and screams that she did whatever she had to do to get her daughter to Whittendale, and she was no different from the rest of the world for that.
That evening, Nicole can’t find her mother at home, and the police are looking for her since they suspect that she may have killed Bill Yellen to silence him about the test she took. Lacy is waiting at Mandy’s house, and she knocks out the mother and daughter and ties them up. She wants to kill them because she blames them for taking her daughter away from her. In an effort to save the situation, Parker tells her that she never wanted to go to Whittendale and just wanted to be someplace close to home. Lacy is furious upon hearing it because if she had known this before, she wouldn’t have done everything she did. She is about to kill them both when Nicole comes there and stops her. Even the police are not far behind, and they arrest Lacy, who has gone completely mad due to the situation.
At the end of Nightmare School Moms, neither Parker nor Nicole are going to Whittendale, but they have both gotten into other good colleges. Mandy has stepped in as a parent figure for Nicole, and they are all very happy. Nicole is still in touch with her mom in prison, who is coaching the prisoners for their tests now, implying that she may have gotten counseling but has not left behind her competitive streak.
Final Thoughts
Lifetime movies, though a little simplistic in their narrative, never fail to be engaging. We have enjoyed watching the madness of Lacy Settle unfold on screen and how it carried the fates of so many people in its wake. The one thing that Nightmare School Moms tried to show is that competition is often a conflict within ourselves instead of with others, and if we want things to be different, it is us that we have to take a good hard look at instead of criticizing outsiders. We would definitely recommend this movie.
