Intensity
Chyna Shepherd (Parker) accompanies her friend Laura Templeton to her house for Thanksgiving dinner. A serial killer named Edgler Vess (McGinley) invades the house and kills Laura and her parents, as Chyna hides in the killer's vehicle. When Vess stops at a gas station, Chyna escapes and asks the two attendants to call the police.
Before she has time to explain, Vess returns and murders the two workers with a shotgun. Chyna then learns that he is holding a 14-year-old girl named Ariel hostage in his basement. She becomes determined to save Ariel and follows Vess back to his home. On the road she runs into Miriam (Laurie) and asks her to call the police. The woman does not realize that Chyna is serious about the murders until she sees the two dead bodies back at the gas station.
Unfortunately, she is hysterical on the phone with the police, telling them that they 'need to save Chyna and Ariel,' which the police interpret as the ramblings of a lunatic. Upon trying to fall back to sleep, the policeman, Ethan Trevaine, remembers the name Ariel from a missing person's case and starts investigating. Trevaine starts to find clues on what type of vehicle the killer was driving, and what Miriam was talking about earlier.
Meanwhile, the car Chyna is driving runs out of gas so she leaves it in the middle of the road, forcing Vess to stop and push it out of the way. While he does so, Chyna runs back into his trailer and hides, unknowingly leaving foot prints. Intrigued, Vess decides to have some fun and pretend he does not know she is there. He then kills Miriam when she tries to run him off the road and save Chyna. When they arrive at the home, Chyna attempts to free Ariel from a fortified room but is attacked and subdued by Vess. As a captive, Chyna speaks with Vess and has flashbacks to her traumatic childhood: as a little girl, she witnessed her disturbed, abusive mother and her boyfriend kill her grandparents.
When Vess finally leaves for work, Chyna takes the opportunity to free herself from her chains. She then frees Ariel and attempts to flee with her in Vess's mobile home, but unwittingly triggers an alarm that alerts him to her actions and causes him to return home early.
Trevaine arrives at Vess's house, where Vess sets his vicious pet Dobermans upon him. Vess disguises himself as a State Trooper to make it appear as if Chyna had murdered her friends and the gas station employees and took Ariel as a hostage. Chyna gets the better of Vess, however: she sets him on fire, locks him in Ariel's old room, and watches as he burns to death.
In the aftermath, Chyna visits Ariel in a psychiatric hospital but is denied custody of her in a hearing; she is told that the catatonic young girl will require extensive therapy to recover from her trauma. As Chyna prepares to leave without her, Ariel suddenly calls out to her the name of "Badger", a character from a story Chyna had told her to bring her courage while escaping from Vess. The two embrace, and it is implied that Chyna then adopts Ariel.
murder