***SPOILERS*** Movie about justice both legal and righteous gone totally berserk with single mom Linda Hemmings, Victoria Principal,taking the law, sort off, into her own hands. Linda ends up blasting away Charles Ryter, Jonathan Banks, after he just couldn't help himself from threatening to re-kidnap her daughter Dana, Danielle Harris, and this time finish the job that he messed up the first time around.
After leaving a friends house Dana is missing and the police are called on the case when there's an eye witness to her being abducted by someone in a car. Later that night Dana comes home in a state of shock and tells her mother and the officer in charge of finding her Lt. Wiillman, Paul Sorvino that the person who kidnapped and later molested her is the father of one of the girls in her class a Charles Ryter.
Arrested at his job at the local meat packing plant Ryter is put into custody at the local jail with a bail for $50,000.00. Addmitting that he did pick up little Dana since they both knew each other and was about to drive her home, just four blocks away from her friends house, but she suddenly got very upset and then let her out to walk home by herself. At first you feel that Ryter even though he isn't such a nice guy, he has a long record for criminal assault, is telling the truth. Ryter comes across as sincere as well as wanting to put his shattered life together by getting back to his estranged wife and daughter. You soon realize that he's as crazy and dangerous as Linda thinks he is.
Calling Linda from the jail house Ryter threatens to murder Dana and make sure that her body is never found! All this makes Linda as well as her daughter more terrified of Ryter being in jail then when he was out free. At the pretrial hearing Ryter's lawyer gets his bail reduced to $10,000.00 enough for him to make it and be out free.
Out on bail Ryter makes life a living hell for Linda and Dana to the point that she has Dana go with some friends of hers out of town to get away from him! At the same time the police are helpless to do anything until Ryter does anything criminal which he's clever enough not to do. Linda finds through her own research that a number of young girls, like Dana, have disappeared over the last two years in the area and that Ryter was is some way connected to them, but like now there wasn't any evidence to connect him to the disappearances.
Ryter's actions drives Linda to shadow him and try to find evidence that he was responsible for the girls disappearances, and possibly murders, in order to put him behind bars and away from her and her daughter. One night as he's drunk and asleep in his home she sneaks in and finds a camera with film in it. Taking the film out to have it later developed to see if there's anything on it, to prove he's the murderer that she thinks he is, Ryter pops up. After making threats against Linda and her daughter Ryter seems to lunge at her and she shoots him with his gun that she found hidden in a closet.
With Ryter dead, from an apparent suicide, and buried and not feeling any fear of him anymore Linda and Dana can return to a normal life but complications arrive that she could have never imagined and they may well put an innocent man Charlie Garnses (Jeremy Roberts) ,who was later arrested for Ryter's murder, behind bars for life! Linda who actually killed Ryter would have to live with the terrible fact that she put him there.
It's impossible to have any sympathy for the victim, Charles Ryter, but at the same time he was innocent in the eyes of the law at the time that he was shot and killed by Linda. The fact that it was Linda that broke into his house even took the reason for self-defense away from her should she have stood trial! Yet you in no way could have convicted her if you a member of the jury at her trial no matter what crimes she broke in killing Ryter.
Normally you would want what happened in the movie to happen in real life, Linda allowed to go free by a very sympathetic Lt. Willman, and the proof of Ryter's crimes coming out after his death by the police finding three bodies of little girls and evidence connecting him to their murder. Still you just know that things like this just don't happen in real life and in this case even in the movies.
