A storm, flooded streets & a series of accidents - the worst of
them caused by Ed (John Broderick), who ran over Alice (Leila Kenzle) by
car - causes 10 people to seek refuge in Larry's (John Hawkes) rundown
motel, & they are besides Ed & Alice Alice's husband (John
C.McGinley) & son Timmy (Bret Loehr), the tv-actress (Rebecca
DeMornay) Ed was driving, prostitute Paris (Amanda Peet) who has stolen
a suitcase of money, newlyweds Ginny (Clea DuVall) & Lou (William
Lee Scott), & of course cop Rhodes (Ray Liotta) & his psycho
convict (Jake Busey).
& wouldn't you know it, before long the
convict escapes & the tv-star is murdered. Rhodes & Ed - an
ex-cop himself - take it upon themselves to hunt down the convict they
of course believe to be the culprit & urge the others to stay
together in a room for safety, but soon the newlyweds get into a fight,
leave the group, & Lou ends up dead, too. Meanwhile the convict is
really on the run, desperate to leave the motel behind him, & he
sees some houses, breaks into one - & realizes he has just broken
into the motel he desperately tried to get away from. Ed & Rhodes
find him of course & beat him to pulp, then bind him to a chair.
But
when he is left alone for a few minutes & is totally helpless, he is
killed too in a most brutal way. Suspicion now falls upon Larry -
especially when in his freezer a corpse is found, & his excuse for
that fact is most feeble. So now Larry is bound to a chair, but when
Alice dies from the wounds of her accident, he can use the confusion to
try a getaway, but when doing so runs over Alice's husband - who was
trying to save his son Timmy - with a car before crashing it into a shed.
Ed now has the idea of letting Ginny & Timmy - the least guilty of
the group of survivors - go & search for the killer among the
remaining group - but then the car with which the woman & the kid
wanted to escape blows up. Curiously enough though, no corpses are found
in the car's wreck - but not only that, none of the corpses are found at
all, anywhere, & ... Ed wakes up to a different reality, he seems to
be one manifestation of a psychotic killer with a multiple personality
disorder, & not only that, he is not even Ed after all but Malcolm (Pruitt
Taylor Vince) a convict sentenced to death who has one final hearing to
determine if he is either put to death or the sentence sustained for
reasons of insanity. The whole mystery-plot is only taking place in his
mind, being a fight of his different personae, among them the killing
persona (!?).
Back to the motel, where hooker Paris finds out that cop
Rhodes is not a cop after all but a convict himself, & just about
everybody shoots everybody else until only Paris, the hooker with a
heart of gold, stays alive & goes to Florida to grow oranges - as -
in real life - does Malcolm, whose sentence was sustained since the
court has been convinced that the killer - in the form of fake cop
Rhodes - has been killed off in his mind. But then little Timmy comes to
visit Paris & kills her - him actually having been the real killer
all along (plausible inasmuch as he was never actually proven dead &
had easiest access to all the murder victims). In real life, Malcolm
kills his guards ... It starts out as a nice, old-fashioned
but not dusty old-dark-house-whodunit, that does not make the mistake to
needlessly update the genre with fancy camera-shots, computer generated
effects, or over-constructed psychological expsanations - until the final
third that is, when the movie takes a postmodernist turn & everything is explained away as just taking place in
the mind of a convict with multiple personality disorder, which comes
across extremely heavy handed, way too superficial, not really thought
through & - let's face it - silly. However, fortunately that
plottwist does come too late to seriously spoil the movie as a whole.
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