User Reviews

****SPOILERS**** Totally unbelievable story about a 17 year old car washer Michael Nowlin, Chis Jacot, who's used as a toy boy by one of his clients the sexy ex-fashion model Vive Jameson, Jayne Heitmeyer, who after a number of romps in the hey or bed gets tired of him and throws the love-sick Michael out of the house. Throwing a fit or vase against the wall Michael storms out and ends up getting drunk as he drive back home to his widowed mom's Sandra Nowlin's, Tracy Nelson, place to sleep it off.

It's the very next day at the breakfast table as his mom demands to know where a by then sobered up Michael was out that late at night that the news of Vive's murder is broadcast on the morning TV news! Working in a car dealership in town Vive was one of Sandar's clients and both her and Michael knew her quite well! In fact it was Michael who was going to Vive's place late at night, after school, for the last two months to wash her car. As it turned out he was also working off the books by having an affair with her.

It didn't take long for the local police represented by detectives Bruning & Feria, Bruce Boxleitner & Lorraine Ansell, to sniff out the truth about Michael's activities that fateful evening in that it was determined by the police pathologist that the murdered Vive had sex that evening with the person who ended up killing her! And that person, surprise surprise, according to the DNA evidence at the murder scene was non other then Michael Nowlin!

The movie goes into high gear with Sandra doing the detective work that both Det. Bruning & Feria were either to lazy or incompetent to do by tracking down Vive's killer as her son, who already has a past criminal record, Michael is facing the rest of his life behind bars if convicted in Vive's murder. It takes a while but Sandra does in fact find a number of important clues that lead to a local liquor store when Michael despite being under age was sold a bottle of booze at the very time that Vive was murdered!

***SPOILERS*** In Sandra trying to get the counterman Johnny, Luigi Saracino,to come clean and tell the cops and the D.A's office that Michael is innocent by him not being at the murder scene he's gunned down by Vive's killer who just happened to be at the store checking out the wine cellar! Now with evidence of her son's innocence by her tracking down, at Ace's Pawnshop, a gold bracelet that Vive's killer hocked Sandra is now in danger of being murdered herself by him!

***SPOILER ALERT*** It's at he very end of the movie that we finally get our moneys worth in who's really behind Vive's murder. This all comes out in the wash, of the Jameson family's dirty laundry, when we realize that it all had to do with a hit-job contracted on her by someone Vive's would have never suspected. This person had it in for her for years in being responsible for her moms untimely death from over-drinking.

It was Vive's husband David Jameson, Barry Flatman, who was completely blindsided by his wife's murderer and accused Michael for it that got the surprise of his life not only when his wife's killer reveled himself but who put him up to it! And even worst of all how Vive took him for a fool and sucker all these years that in the end, in her overreaching herself, backfired on her!

The overarching theme of this whodunnit has less to do with a killer upstairs than the lengths to which a mother will go to protect a child. Such is the case with Sandra's love for her son Michael and what she does to protect him from a dastardly villain trying to frame him for murder.

At first, it looks really bad for the 17-year-old Michael, a car wash boy, who was having an affair with Vivian Jameson, a famous model who lives in Michael's neighborhood. But Vivian was hardly the girl next door, as she was guilty of statuary rape. When she is murdered, the evidence points to Michael who was in her bedroom at a time when she decided to dump him. Even the DNA test confirms Michael's most recent romp with Viv.

With the police not investigating any other suspect but Michael, it is up to his mom Sandra to play the sleuth. When she learns from a modeling friend of Vivian that a man named Lyle may have had an unhappy relationship with her, Sandra moves into action and searches Lyle's home for evidence.

When Sandra recovers in Lyle's possessions a pawn ticket for an expensive bracelet owned by Vivian, but stolen by Lyle, she now has a smoking gun. The obligatory plot twist in the film's climactic scene reveals a strange dysfunction in the Jameson family with the husband David insanely jealous and his daughter Ashley resentful, understandably so because of the infidelity of her lascivious stepmother Viv.

The lurid details of the mystery and the horns that are worn by David Jameson (cuckolded both by Lyle and the car wash boy Michael) are only the backdrop for the core thematic concern of the film: the relentless pursuit of the truth by a mother who stands by her son and will stop at nothing to clear his name. When Sandra tells Michael, "I will never give up on you," she backs up her words with action!