Murder of Innocence (1993)

The greatest movie ever made..!

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This ranks among the lamentably few truly great and strong television movies that I've seen. While most of them admittedly are as severely lacking as they say, the truly special and meaningful ones do stand out, and this is one of those. It's harrowing, disturbing and bleak indeed, but also to me such a heart-wrenchingly emotional and gripping story that I always greatly enjoyed it. It's a powerful drama of one severely mentally-damaged woman's terrifying spiral into a psychopathic madness, and it's littered with tense and edgy moments and scenes that very effectively put you in *her* shoes and take you out of your comfort zone, and it really is one of the most realistic portrayals of such horrific mental illness that's ever been put into any movie as far as I'm concerned. I'm not gonna go too much in depth about it, because it is what it is, a very engrossing drama thriller that follows the sad case of Laurie Wade, a deeply disturbed and mentally unstable woman who, after marrying the man of her dreams, tries to live the happy home life and make everything be so perfect...until the cracks begin to show and bit-by-bit her mind slowly falls apart as her deep-seated troubles are dismissed by doctors and brushed aside by her well-meaning but idiotic and wilfully-blind parents until eventually even her poor husband has no choice but to remove himself from her life, and it all narrows down and comes to a head in a horrendous scene of murder with her shooting at a classroom full of innocent children. It has such a forceful and very well realised psychological aspect to it, and there's some simple, but seriously creepy imagery and moments that make it feel more like a horror movie at points. And this movie did get under my skin the first time I saw it and stuck with me afterwards. I think it fantastically captures the horrific trauma of being a victim and virtual prisoner of your own mind, and you see a lot of the story from her warped perspective and what she's experiencing, seeing paranoid illusions and enemies everywhere, wearing her down and driving her insane. And the way that it's done, you really can understand how someone would lose their goddamn mind if they were under such draining mental assaults every single day, every time they tried to do something normal or talk to another person. Valerie Bertinelli gives a raw knockout performance that I personally couldn't ever see her matching again in her career.. Not based on what I've seen! While the acting is good all-round, it's doubtlessly her that carries and elevates the film to greatness with her emotional intensity. I find her especially impressive during a scene where she's making malicious phone calls to her husband's sister, and she's so amazing as she acts it with just her eyes, like she looks cold and malevolent but there's also such pain in her eyes at the same time, like there's a part of her mind that's well aware that what she's doing is awful, but she's powerless to stop herself. Even at her most inhuman and twisted, I never stopped feeling pity for the character. It is a mystery what actually caused her to snap, but reading between the lines a little, the film does seem to strongly suggest that Laurie may have been the victim of rape at the age of "7", possibly at a park, and her parents, as they were clearly shown to do, may have acted like nothing ever happened and the unconfronted buried trauma of it eventually resurfaced and that's what caused the mental breakdown, or at least that's what I put together.. Plus, how there's several times when she draws an image on mirrors of a crying little girl, and how she scrawls out again and again in one scene words like "Suffer", "Hurt", and "Please." The actual shooting is done in such a surreal and strange way, with her going into a sort of trance and appearing as a child version of herself in her mind with an evil expression on her face, appearing to avenge herself against the children who taunted her.. And although her act was indeed terrible and unforgivable, her story was nevertheless a tragic one, with the woman choosing to end her own life in the end which I think may have been for the best with her frayed mind being what it was. Only in death could she be free of the inner demons that robbed her of her sanity and reduced her to little more than a monster... It's clever, fast-paced, nerve-paralysing at times - an effectively chilling movie-in-the-mind. Good night folks, and remember to guard the better angels inside...

This movie was based on a true story about Laurie Dann who shot a classroom full of children. If I remember correctly and I may not(lol) The Boomtown Rats based their song "I Don't Like Mondays" on her story. Being a teacher, when the teacher says "Why didn't she shoot me?" I cried because I think that's the way I would feel if someone did that to my students. It's sad that her situation had to get to that point for her to get the help she so desperately needed. It reminds me of a case in PA where a woman shot people in the Springfield Mall. She was mentally unstable but she kept being released and then she was able to obtain a gun. I wonder what happened to the real Laurie? If anyone knows please post it, thank you.

I was about eight or nine years old when the real Laurie Dann went on her shooting rampage, about the same age as the children she murdered. The scary thing is, even after seeing this eerie film, I still don't know what it was that caused her to do the horrible things she did. Still the film is an excellent study of what happens when mental illness goes untreated.

Valerie Bertinelli never looked so good. Playing a convincing part of someone who is mentally unstable is no easy task, and Valerie put a lot of fear into me and, I am sure, others who watched this movie. I guess I wasn't alone, because my wife even cringed a little at her in some of the scenes. Some of the supporting acting was so-so, but Valerie gave this movie and topic a real boost. This subject is always timely, and the ensuing tragedy at the school is right in line with events in the 2000's. It makes for a very good movie that will keep you clinging to the arms of your chair.