Murder of Innocence (1993) starring Valerie Bertinelli, Stephen Caffrey, Graham Beckel, Jerry Hardin directed by Tom McLoughlin Movie Review

Murder of Innocence (1993)   3/53/53/53/53/5


Valerie Bertinelli in Murder of Innocence (1993)

Laurie's Losing It

When Matthew Wade (Stephen Caffrey) saw Laurie (Valerie Bertinelli) working as a waitress he was captivated by her beauty and entertained by her feistiness by embarrassing a whining customer. Whilst aware that Laurie has her quirks Matthew is so in love with her that they end up getting married. But that is when things begin to unravel as Laurie's behaviour gets stranger and stranger from emptying the fridge and neatly arranging cosmetics in it to wrecking their bedroom. Whilst Matthew tries his best to cope with Laurie and her behaviour it gets too much for him....

Let me mention a couple of things; firstly "Murder of Innocence" starts with a very dramatic scene involving the police and Laurie in a fragile state. And secondly "Murder of Innocence" is based on a true story, that of Laurie Dann and is adapted from Joel Kaplan's novel "Murder of Innocence: The tragic life and final rampage of Laurie Dann". Now I had never heard of Laurie Dann before watching this but there is plenty of information on Laurie Dann on the net and once you read up it may change your attitude to this movie.

Stephen Caffrey in Murder of Innocence (1993)

So what goes on in "Murder of Innocence"? Well it is one of those movies which start at Z then jumps back to A and works its way to where it started, a thing which many true story movies do especially those made for TV. As we work are way to where the movie starts we are taken into the world of Laurie where she does a reasonable job of controlling her psychological problems but then we see them spiral out of control, so we go from not dealing with making decisions to paranoia and pure psychosis. I won't go in to specifics because with out them "Murder of Innocence" is fascinating and you watch wanting to know what happens next, how bad will it get.

As such "Murder of Innocence" belongs to Valerie Bertinelli and this may sound wrong considering that this is based on a true story but Bertinelli is captivating. The way Bertinelli switches between nice to psychotic is scary and it is all in the face from delivering cute and fun and moody with just a flick of her mouth. In fairness the rest of the acting is good through out with Jerry Hardin and Millie Perkins working well as her parents to provide the movie with an aspect that may be it was their treatment of Laurie as a child, her mum's house proud ness which may have caused part of Laurie's issues.

What this all boils down to is that "Murder of Innocence" is a genuinely fascinating TV movie which does a very good job of telling this disturbing true story. In many ways it works best if you don't know the details but the true story is even more fascinating and in many ways even more sad than the movie.


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