Gail O'Grad stars as a housewife who, earlier, sent her husband to prison for beating her. But when he gets out, he picks up right where he left off, terrorizing his family to the point where she's resolved to kill him, only to get a little liquid courage in order to do the job, but then calling a crisis center and talking to someone who ends up willing to do something about it.
I've loved Gail O'Grady since I first saw her in "Celtic Pride," and I've seen her in television episodes like a judge in "Boston Legal," and a housewife not too unlike her character here, in "Desperate Housewives." The plot for this film was a good one, especially for its time, when this kind of family problems was, basically, still an unspoken evil outside the home. The real problem that's stated here, in my mind, is how a court order is really nothing, because she still loves her husband in a sick way to where she doesn't turn him in the instant he shows up on her doorstep.
The only problem is that I got the feeling the actors were just going through the motions. Amy Pietz is seen here as the crisis center volunteer who shows no emotion when she gets the call from O'Grady. And O'Grady didn't hold her character because you could see the fear on her face when her husband was walking up the sidewalk and later that night when they're all in the house, but that fear found a courage (from somewhere) out of nowhere. I know, for me, if someone stuck a gun to my head and threatened to kill a person I didn't even know in order to find a child, I would be telling them to go ahead and pull the trigger, but the situation was just handled so badly that the climax to the movie was a terrible letdown.
3 out of 10 stars...
