A phobia is an irrational fear of something that drives a person to avoid it at all costs. Dr. Peter Rose (Paul Michael Glaser) had five patients with phobias: heights, public places, snakes, men, and an unknown. Some of these things can and should be feared in the right situation, but it is the extreme fear that makes it a phobia, such as seeing a snake on T.V. and having a panic attack.
Dr. Rose is practicing a new and totally unproven form of therapy he called "Implosion Therapy." The idea is that he would force his patients to face their phobias head on to break them of their phobia. I think it's more of immersion than implosion. Implosion connotes that something burst inward or collapse upon itself. That's not what was going on. He was immersing the patients in an environment with that which they feared. Like putting a claustrophobic in a closet.
Problems started when his first patient was killed. To make matters worse a second, then third patient was killed. Who was the killer was the question. Was it another patient, was it his coworker and ex-lover, or was it the doctor himself? Surely, any surviving patients were going to have death phobia at the rate Dr. Rose's patients were being bumped off.
I liked this movie, the pacing and the dialogue. It was a murder mystery with plausible deaths, meaning that how they died was plausible. Throughout all of the events Dr. Peter stayed cool and detached even. It seemed like the best and most effective way to handle the deaths so that he could be of use to his other patients, but maybe there was something deeper to it.
