This film turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. Bonnie Bedelia was lovely, and acted her part well. I was unfamiliar with the rest of the cast. A few of the actors resembled one another, so it wasn't always easy to keep them straight. Nobody acted poorly. (I thought one actor was bad at first, but later I could see that this was the way the part was written.) The plot held together fairly well, and I didn't see the big reveal coming. But overall, it bored me for the first 2/3 of the film. I suppose it doesn't matter, as I see that no one has commented on it for over a decade.

'The Stranger' is a great selection for a late night, low budget cable thriller. Bonnie Bedelia is Alice Kildee, a woman who suffers from a bought of amnesia after witnessing a murder. Peter Reigert is the mild-mannered psychiatrist, Dr. Harris Kite, who works with her to help her remember what happened that night that her car went off the road and she wound up in the hospital. When the cops begin investigating Kildee's predicament, they assume she can lead them to a killer. But they stupidly decide that the only way they will find any information as to her identity, is to put her picture on the television news and in the newspapers. Her attackers, wanting something that they think Kildee knows the whereabouts of and wanting to kill the only woman who can tie them to the murder, decide to track her down. The only one who can really protect her, and who can help her piece together her memories of the event, Dr. Kite, is also limited by his own faults: the leader of the guys looking for Alice Kildee promise to square a tremendous gambling debt in exchange for his information.The movie offers enough red herrings and stories of rather subtle double-cross to make it a fairly well paced plot, with decent acting to back it up. And, as other viewers have already commented, what you assume Alice's memories to reveal in the beginning of the film, are completely different by the end of the film. Despite the tendency of b-grade 80s thrillers to disappoint on several levels (and most importantly, within the plot), this one is well worth trying.

We see a woman hiding in an isolated house, as two armed men terrorize three people in the living room, and a pop song plays loudly on a record player. The three people get shot, and the woman runs. She winds up in town, where she hops into her car and speeds off, but gets into an accident, and someone sets her car ablaze. However, she'd gotten out of the car before it caught fire, and winds up in the hospital with amnesia. All she can remember is the gunmen, the murders, and fleeing the house.A psychiatrist returns to the hospital he works at, having lost over $60,000 in Las Vegas. He treats the woman with amnesia until a specialist can arrive from out of town. The police, not knowing anything about the murders she remembered, are skeptical. They disseminate her photo by newspaper and TV, and a gunman soon arrives to kill her, at which point she's taken a little more seriously. The bad guys intimidate the doctor, by buying his marker, and demanding that he find out what happened to something of theirs the woman took. I know I've seen other movies with the plot element of "bad guys pressure doctor to find out information from patient," but the only one I can think of at the moment is Don't Say a Word (2001) - which I would say was a better movie than this one.This was a pretty good thriller. There was a neat twist towards the end I particularly liked that cleared up a question I had that had occurred to me early on in the movie. The ending itself was fairly predictable.

Short, suspenseful, and generally well-acted. There are worse ways to kill 90 minutes. And there are a couple of interesting twists in this story about a woman who thinks she has witnessed a multiple murder, but can remember nothing else. Bedelia and Riegert are almost always watchable. Generally nothing new, but certainly not bad.