(1996) Not wanting to return to foster care after her mother Ramona (Amanda Plummer) and stepfather Larry (Michael T. Weiss) are arrested again, Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon), an illiterate teenager with plenty of street smarts, cuffs Mrs Sheets from Children's Services to a bed and lights out north for her real (died before she was born) father's mother's home in Stockton, Calif.

Earlier while she was watching a cartoon of "Little Red Walking Hood," the program was interrupted by a live news bulletin of the I-5 serial killer's having murdered two teenage prostitutes. Her black boyfriend Chopper gives her a gun to pawn for cash, but when the car overheats on the freeway, she accepts a ride in an SUV from Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland) on his way to LA.

Director/writer Matthew Bright has turned Little Red Riding Hood into an urban-crime thriller, inside out and upside down - often violent and occasionally funny - with an original Danny Elfman score.

In an effort to earn Vanessa's confidence - "You're going to have to trust me … let me in" - Bob explains that as a school counselor for emotionally-disturbed boys he's been trained to listen to a person's "trauma and anguish." After she tells him of her bad experiences in foster homes, of her mother's being a whore, of her stepfather's numerous incarcerations for drugs, Bob proposes trying a "powerful new psychological technique" on her, involving penetratingly intimate questions, such as whether or not Larry ever sexually abused her.

Cutting off her pigtail with his razor, Bob turns mean and nasty, categorizing her with other "garbage people." Vicious as a bobcat when she has to be, Vanessa turns tables on Bob, who pleads with her, "I wasn't going to hurt you." She asks the sick criminal: "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and personal Savior?"

Bob's wife Mimi (Brooke Shields in a possibly intentionally ironic role as a grownup for the waif in Taxi) demands that Vanessa be tried and sentenced as an adult for what she's done to her husband. While Sheriff Garnet Wallace (Dan Hedaya) and Detective Mike Breer (Wolfgang Bodison) question Vanessa about the incident with Wolverton at night, eliciting from her the numerous times she'd been arrested for shoplifting, arson, and solicitation, when Breer remarks that the latter occupation just came naturally to her, she attacks him verbally (the same way his being black just came naturally) and physically.

In jail (punished with solitary confinement and defined as having an uncontrollable "anti-personality disorder") she survives and escapes by using her sharp wits and claws. At Grandma's she makes a grim ending for her adversary.

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