Ray Hardy has been drugged and fleeced by a pair of bar girls the night before his big job interview. Then the girls show up at his house demanding blackmail or they’ll spread photos of Ray being serviced under the table across the internet—after showing them to his wife.   But paying off these hustlers isn’t the worst of it:  there’s a killer come to town looking for these girls and the money they stole from their employer and he has an unorthodox way of putting pressure on Ray—he kills one of the girls and dumps her in Ray’s garage.                        

SYNOPSIS:

Ray Hardy’s nervous breakdown knocked him out of a career as a philosophy professor. Years later, a reformed drinker married to a religious woman and living in a small town, he’s trying to get back on his feet. He has a job interview for a teaching position downstate at a junior college. Two girls, working for a Ukrainian criminal who owns the Ritz bar that fleeces the drunks reeled into his place, spike Ray’s drink at his hotel and lead him on an all-night drinking binge that leaves him a wreck for his interview. He discovers his credit-card bill has been bloated for thousands of dollars from bottles of phony French champagne from the bar that night.

Even worse, the girls show up at his house a week later and threaten to expose him to his wife with cell phone videos and photos taken while he was drunk. His family back East gives him the money to pay the blackmail.

But Ray’s nightmare isn’t over. The girls have ripped off the bar owner of seventy thousand dollars. He sends his brother and a psychopathic mercenary known as the Catcher to find the girls and get his money back. When contacted, Ray refuses to help. That night the bar owner’s brother attacks Ray in his yard but is killed when Ray’s wife steps in to save her husband. Playing his own sick game, the Catcher leaves the dead body of one of the bar girls in Ray’s garage. Tracking the other girl and the missing money, the Catcher taunts Ray with another victim—this time his harmless, elderly next-door neighbor. The body count only serves to whet the Catcher’s appetite for keeping Ray stuck fast in his sadistic game.

The cops suspect there’s a serial killer in their town and Ray becomes the prime suspect. Ray is horrified when the other girl shows up at his doorstep. She’s in trouble with nowhere to run and a serious dope addiction. When Ray breaks under stress and resumes drinking, his wife leaves him. As if things weren’t going to hell fast enough, the boyfriend of the murdered girl shows up while Ray is jogging in the park, and he, too, demands a payoff or he’ll hurt Ray and his wife. He tells Ray his own wife is nursing the dope-sick girl in a cheap motel outside town. Ray had better get in that motel room and bring him the stolen money.

The Catcher, however, kills the boyfriend while he’s sitting in the car waiting for Ray. The cops by now are convinced Ray is responsible for the murder of the next-door neighbor and they head to his house with a warrant. But the Catcher beats them to it. Now Ray, his wife, and the bar girl are in his power, along with the bar owner, who has been summoned to town. He intends to inflict as much pain as possible on Ray before killing him while the Catcher tortures the two women in a storage facility at the edge of town.