**SPOILERS** Underdevloped and overdone film that has at least four different plot-lines to it and not enough time, some 90 minutes, to fully explain them.
Kate Wilson, Annette O'Toole, has been living with her old and infirmed mom Mrs. Wilson,Eva Marie Saint, since her husband left her without any notice and with a full closet of his dirty laundry. Working as a real-estate agent by day and changing into a red hot party-animal at night has her mom wonder if she actually does spend all her nights away from her at home,chit chatting and playing cards, with her friend Reba like Kate tell her that she does.
One afternoon after work Kate,all dressed up to kill, is involved in a minor traffic accident with Betty Carlson and tow-truck driver Gary Smith aka Grafton just happens to come along to fix Betty's flat tire. From hearing them talk Gary finds that they both know each other from the Red Oak Inn. Gary turned on by Betty later sneaks into her house and after trying to rape her knocks her against the bathroom tub killing her. Gary paranoid that he'd be caught, because Kate saw him, is now on a mission to track her down and keep her from permanently talking to the police or anyone else.
The movie also tried to cover Kate's relationship with her mom and her pick-ups or boyfriends that she had at the Red Oak Inn. Were given glimpses of Kate's childhood and the circumstances of her baby brother, Lawrence,death that her mom held Kate responsible for. There's also the suicide of her Mrs. Wilson's husband Burton who kill himself shortly after Lawrence's died. On top of all that there's the fact that Gary is a good husband and father but has this hang up with young women who's only way of showing them any affection is by beating their brains out.
You put all this together in the movie with two detectives on the case of Betty Carlson's murder who, or at least one of them, acted towards old and sick Mrs. Wilson as if she were a captured Al-Qeada terrorist! That by the time it was over you had no idea just what it was trying to tell you? Was there a serial murder on the loose in the town of Santa Rosa? We were told that earlier in the film but Gary's killing of Betty came later in the movie and for all intents and purposes it was his first, and only, killing and it was also not planned by him but something that went terribly wrong on his part.
We also saw later in the film Gary not being able to murder Kate because he just didn't have it in him. So why were we given this red herring about a serial killer/rapist when he never was there in the first place? There was also a hint in the film of Kate having a lover that she frequently met at the Red Oak Inn. But later, like with Gary,it really didn't pan out since Kate never gave him her real name and was having affairs on the side with other men she met there at the same time she was seeing him.
