A mother's revenge

Year of release : 1993

Run time : 1h33m

Genre : Thriller / Drama / Crime

The television movie "A mother's revenge" or "Desperate Justice" is based on the 1989 novel "Desperate Justice" by Richard Speight ,who was a criminal attorney in Tennessee, so this might be based on actual events.

Carol seems to live the perfect life in an idylic suburbia, with her husband and her two daughters, teenage Jill, and 12 year old Wendy.

When the movie opens, Carol is busy, and asks Jill to pick up her sister from school, at 5 PM, as she can't make it. Jill works at a record store, and forgets about it, looking at the clock at past 5, and rushing to get her.

Wendy was friendly with the janitor who, when he sees her all alone in front of the school, is trying to "help". Wendy gets inside the school to call her mother, and when her sister gets there, she's nowhere to be found.

Jill gets home, tells her parents Wendy is missing, and goes back with her father to look for her. Neither of them can find her, so they call the police.

When they find her, she is in a coma,badly b3aten and r@ped.

The police arrest Frank Warden, as he had two prior ch1ld m0lestat1on charges in California, and find a piece of Wendy's hair in his car (we also see him wiping her blood off his car before he is caught). Before he was arrested, he circled the hospital room Wendy was in, trying to get to her ,finding she's not dead, calling the family to tell them to shut her up, 'case if she says anything he's gonna k1ll her.

Frank's mother gets him the best attorney, and the woman manages to get the court to dismiss the case, so, in a moment of sheer madness, seeing Frank laughing for getting away with it, Carol takes the gun she carried in her purse since they were threatened, and shoots him in front of everyone in court.

She is taken to jail, and released on bail until trial.

Carol spends her days mostly at the hospital, by Wendy's side, who's in a coma. She pretty much ignores her eldest daughter, whom she probably considers responsible for what happened to Wendy, which she kinda is (but then again, Carol was supposed to pick Wendy up, and she knew Jill was working).

Awaiting trial, she asks the same woman who represented her daughter's r@pist to be her attorney, as she was the best. Although at first refuses, because she still is Frank's attorney, when he dies, she accepts.

The movie was surprisingly good, I enjoyed it. The family is ridden with guilt, Carol for what she did, Jill for not getting there in time, the father for not being able to protect his family, and even Wendy because her mother goes to jail "because of her".

One thing that bothered me was that for a lawyer who was supposed to be good, and got the r@pist off, she couldn't get Carol off.She didn't even ask Wendy (who had a bruised face, a broken arm and leg, and told her mother Frank did it) to take the stand, I don't even know if they asked her who b3at and r@ped her, I think the police just forgot about her. At the end of the movie Frank's mother says she knows her son did it (although she took his side) based on how he acted, which means the police still didn't know he was guilty!

Also, most of the movie centers on the family life, on Carol's life and the problems she has with her family, her daughter she doesn't get along with, and only in the last half an hour we see her trial.

Watching this I kept on wondering how can lawyers (especially women,mothers) represent guilty people, specially the kind of people in this movie!

The acting was good!

You can watch the movie here, for free :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahz41H7BrWM&ab_channel=ThrillGore

Rating : Worth a watch !