1943. Evil and unscrupulous mill foreman Pink Gresham (well played to the despicable hilt by Bill Smitrovich) gets murdered in a small backwoods town in rural Virginia. Gresham's mousy widow Maggie (a solid and sympathetic portrayal by Kathy Baker) gets paid a visit by mysterious drifter Baston Morris (a fine performance by Peter Weller), who openly admits that he murdered Gresham and seeks refuge in Maggie's home.Writer/director David Saperstein delivers a strong and flavorsome evocation of the 1940's period setting as well as an equally potent and unnerving sense of isolation and vulnerability, with the remote island location that's being terrorized by a pack of wild dogs coming across as especially well-realized. Baker and Weller do stand-out work in the leads, with sturdy support from the always dependable John Glover as meddlesome local minister Sheb Sheppard. Both John Barry's moody score and the handsome cinematography by Dominique Chapuis are up to par. However, the often sluggish pacing and frequently meandering narrative make this one a bit of a rough slog to get through at times. Those flaws aside, this film overall still sizes up as a pretty engrossing and effective outing.

Call me crazy, but I just don't think it's EVER a good idea to sleep with an ax-murderer. Of course, Maggie Gresham didn't know that at the time, but she DID know the soon to be revealed maniac killed her own husband, lout that he was. I'd never be so cold as to say the guy deserved it, but he was asking for trouble right from the opening scene.To be fair, Baston Morris (Peter Weller) did keep you guessing with his soft spoken demeanor and repeated promises not to hurt Maggie. You just had to overlook the ax in the headboard that one time he got his back up. How he figured to replace his dead family with a live one is how this story plays out, but there are red flags all over the place if you're paying attention.The bit with the wild dogs roaming the Gresham island was effective for an additional horror component, and now that I think about it, why did the residents let that go on for so long? But it did set up that perfectly grisly ending, even though we don't get to see it. Quite honestly, there aren't any redeeming characters in this flick unless you count the two absent Gresham children, who by the end of the film still didn't know their Dad was a goner.

The lurid title isn't much of an improvement over the name of Robert Houston's original novel ('Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday') but it at least hints at the occasionally overwrought plotting in this Appalachian thriller, a murder/hostage drama set in rural West Virginia circa 1943. Some careful attention to period flavor helps give the film a definite sense of time and place, not that it matters after ignorant drifter Peter Weller kills a wicked mill foreman and holds his victim's long-suffering wife captive for three days. The set-up is dramatically sound, but every shred of credibility gets tossed out the window in the second act: Kathy Baker begins to sympathize with her captor; they sleep together; he's then revealed to be a homicidal maniac, and so forth. Perhaps it's all meant to be a parable of one woman's liberation out from under male authority, but the subtext is too confused for the film to work as anything deeper than a routine, violent psychodrama. In the end what might have been a real sleeper winds up as just another corpse.

With a vicious and unpredictable wild dog pack running loose, and a killer in her house, Kathy Baker is trapped on an island, and in one terrific predicament. To complicate matters, it was her abusive husband who Peter Weller killed. The setting for this steamy psychological thriller is 1943 rural West Virginia, and everything is well depicted, and seems quite authentic. Adding to the realism is interesting music and sound effects. The acting and accents are top notch, and the script has several twists and turns, along with a few short flashbacks that tie things together. Eventually the past catches up with all the characters, and the conclusion is totally acceptable. - MERK