Having myself been subject to the whims of a sanctimonious, humourless and controlling stepmother, every time the second Mrs Haddon appeared I would dearly have loved to see the poisonous old dragon punched in the face. The village are supposed to have known stepdaughter April and her real parents all her life but are remarkably quick to take her stepmother's side against her; although it's characteristic of the film's clumsy scripting that April keeping hurting her case by making her opposition to this cuckoo in the nest too obvious from the word go and blurting out wild allegations before she's bothered to gather sufficient evidence against her.
The plot is sufficiently engrossing, however, and the ghastly Florence sufficiently loathsome, to keep you watching in anticipation of eventually seeing her get her comeuppance; maybe falling to her death or crashing her car attempting to escape. But it instead ends with a whimper rather than a bang, with a talky conclusion and the unbelievable revelation (which - to compound the felony - we're told rather than shown) that the handsome hero just happened to be passing by at 2am, thus enabling him to come to the rescue!
The plot is sufficiently engrossing, however, and the ghastly Florence sufficiently loathsome, to keep you watching in anticipation of eventually seeing her get her comeuppance; maybe falling to her death or crashing her car attempting to escape. But it instead ends with a whimper rather than a bang, with a talky conclusion and the unbelievable revelation (which - to compound the felony - we're told rather than shown) that the handsome hero just happened to be passing by at 2am, thus enabling him to come to the rescue!