18 March 2024
A Killing in a Small Town (1990)
100 min.
Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal.
With Barbara Hershey, Brian Dennehy, Hal Holbrook, John Terry, Lee Garlington.
Exceptional fact-based TV thriller features Hershey as a religious wife and mother who is tried for butchering her friend 41 times with an axe.

Hershey is Candy Morrison in this modern-day "Lizzie Borden" tale, a bored housewife who has a brief affair with her husband's best friend Stan (Terry).

But when Stan's wife Peggy (Garlington) shows up brutally axed to death, is Candy the bloody culprit? If not her, who?

Boasts a stunning, Emmy-winning performance from Hershey in perhaps her first character role, and Gyllenhaal's direction depicts a fabulous mood of rural tension and Bible-belt ignorance.

The scenes of Hershey under hypnosis, and Garlington's murder, are hands-down nail-biters.

Well-acted by all, this suprisingly violent TV movie is an absolute must-see.

Adapted from Jim Atkinson and John Bloom's book Evidence of Love, based on the real events that took place in Texas in 1980.

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