Shelby didn't accept a break up with high school football star Mike who has since moved on to college at Northwestern and attached himself to another, Elizabeth. She can not and will not believe Mike is no longer the man for her, and in pure FATAL ATTRACTION/PLAY MISTY FOR ME style, goes off the deep end.

Shelby will set out to wreck Mike's relationship with Elizabeth whatever the cost. Mischa Barton has this moment where she quietly fumes and dwells on Mike's truly leaving her in the dust...dragging off a cigarette, the contemplation of losing him yet again is present on her face(it's a good scene I give Barton credit for). Driving home while sobbing, Shelby hits Liz with her vehicle as she was walking the side of the road seeking help from someone because she needed a ride to Mike's mom's house..Shelby got Liz liquored up so she couldn't meet Mike's mom.

Echoes of MISERY as Shelby has Liz in a bed where her sick mother once spent her last years dying, feeding her intravenous tube with a sleeping agent to keep her either sedated or so weakened she can not move(not to mention Liz' ankle is badly damaged)..and when she attempts to due so is often thwarted by her injury.

Letting go is hard to do in Shelby's case and this is like an opportunity which landed right in her lap. Pretty much holding her hostage, mangled ankle and all, Shelby can use this as an advantage to, in her devious state, "win" back the man she adores(more like obsesses about). There's this amusing scene where Liz finds a room which serves as a literal shrine to Mike, with pictures all over the walls, doodles, and heartfelt scribblings devoted to the man she yearns for.

HOMECOMING is one of those movies which allows another actress her chance to play the psychotic, cold-hearted bitch role. There are all these Lifetime Movie clichés to stomach, thriller staples that have wore out their welcome. Such as the evidence, taped underneath the toilet bowl lid no less, where it proves that Shelby poisoned her mother. The revelation that Liz has been kidnapped, discovered by Mike in the knick of time. The numerous near escapes where Liz just about frees herself from Shelby's clutches. The victim who finds Liz bound only to be executed for turning his back on Shelby. How Shelby takes a licking and keeps on ticking, in ridiculous fashion..she takes a shot to the forehead by a ceramic toilet bowl lid, her head slammed up against a wall, and a variety of punches to the face with a football helmet.

And, if you really think about it, the idea that this beautiful young woman who seems to have a degree of intelligence, would have this homicidal love for a boy, even if he's the town's famous football legend, is a bit over the top and hard to swallow. He's this sensitive dreamboat who just has a hard time accepting that Liz would leave him without even confronting him, though Shelby tries her hardest to get him to think so. And, Shelby flaunts in Liz' face how she'll get Mike back while her prisoner must suffer..all of this I've described will be quite familiar to those who watch these movies.

It's really a sister to movies like SWIMFAN about female lunatics who do not respond well when their love is spurned by the young man they worship.

Barton fulfills the requirements of such a role and Stroup is a nice young actress with a pleasant personality, whose Elizabeth doesn't deserve what is happening to her. It all has been done before folks, nothing new to see here. Michael Landes is Mike's cop pal, Billy Fletcher who is used as a tool in the screenplay to potentially talk him into reentering a relationship with Shelby. I do think, as evident by this movie, that Stroup is a star in the making. Matt Long is the young man Barton loves with all her heart. Funniest scene could be when Shelby starts eating a meat sandwich, possibly cut from the body of a victim she had just killed!

I have to say that I didn't sit all the way through this pastiche of other horror/suspense/drama movies. It borrowed from so many sources -- afternoon soap operas to "Fatal Attraction" -- that I think it did something to my brain. Even now, an hour after I shut it off, it still feels as if there's some kind of insect buzzing around inside my skull. A moth. No, it's too substantial and spasmodic in its behavior for that -- a grasshopper. There it goes again.

Mischa Barton, under the conviction that she and her boyfriend away at college, are still hooked up, is shaken when Matt Lott brings home the beautiful young sensitive Jessica Stroup.

Barton wangles things -- I won't bother to explain how -- so that Stroup gets drunk and is stranded on a deserted highway in the middle of the night. Barton accidentally strikes the lone figure with her car, brings her home, and keeps her in bed, all wrapped in bandages and sedated with an IV drip and vials of potions -- "just things left over from when my mother was sick." Now, I'd been looking forward to some amusing bitchy exchanges and skullduggery but the realization that I was watching a very bad imitation of Stephen King's "Misery" was a downer. I think that any normal person watching Mischa Barton applying some torque to Stroup's broken ankle and hearing the patient screech with pain would immediately long for Kathy Bates with her winning smile and sledgehammer.

I don't know. Watch it if you want. I think you'll be disappointed at this jury rigged drama but you might enjoy it. You aren't likely to be repelled by the acting. None of it is particularly wrong, though the men are nonentities. Mischa Barton has a sensuous and slightly sadistic look built into her features. It's hard to believe this is the same radiant post-adolescent who appeared in, what was it, "Pups"? And Jessica Stroup, beyond being alluring in her own right, projects the just the kind of blind trust the part calls for.

I had already noted a low rating for this movie on various sites but the subject matter appealed to me as a fan of Misery, Play Misty for Me, Misery et al so I gave it a go expecting nothing of any shock value and was not disappointed on that front. This film had elements of all three of the aforementioned films but had too few pearls stretched out on a decidedly threadbare string.

Almost immediately the viewer becomes frustrated at the stupidity of Mike and his girlfriend Elizabeth as they take a trip back to his roots where his "intense" - as Mike describes her - ex-girlfriend, Shelby, runs a bowling alley. After meeting some of Mike's friends, Elizabeth decides she wants to follow them on with Mike to the Bowling alley in spite of being informed about the existence of Shelby. After Shelby plies Elizabeth with tequila whilst playing the amiable ex, Elizabeth, keen to make a good first impression on Mike's parents decides she is too drunk to meet with them that night so Mike's police officer brother drives Elizabeth to a remote hotel and Mike back to his folks. This is where the first major flaw of the plot is seen. Would you seriously drop your young girlfriend off in a hotel car park in a strange and remote area without seeing her safely inside and ensuring she has secured a room? Apparently not as she is left to wheel her case in and wave from the door as her chaperones speed off into the night before being told there are in fact no vacancies and the sign that says otherwise is broken. This leaves Elizabeth to walk four miles West in the dark to locate another hotel until she flags down a passing car which promptly knocks her into a ditch.

When she awakens, Elizabeth finds herself in a strange bedroom attached to a drip and being "nursed" by Shelby who is intent on hiding the injured girlfriend away whilst she desperately tries to win back the affections of her ex, Mike. It quickly becomes evident that Shelby is a dangerous psychopath and one wonders why the smart Elizabeth didn't just play along with her games and manipulate Shelby by asserting that she wanted to break up with Mike. A girl of her calibre could have easily cooked up some fictitious and feasible story which would have placated Shelby and ensured Elizabeth's relative safety. This is a common flaw in movies of this ilk. The hostage making ill-planned escape attempts, showing the fear that only feeds the hostage-taker or to the contrary, antagonising their captors and sustaining more injuries for their efforts.

The characters were hard to care about in any capacity which is so often the case where teenagers are involved. Predicable diatribe in my opinion, lacking every ounce of substance that Misery brought to the screen.