1995’s Stolen Innocence opens with 18 year-old Stacy Sapp (Tracey Gold) trying to sneak back into her house after a long night of drinking and partying.  Unfortunately for her, Stacey isn’t very good at sneaking around and she’s caught by her mother (Bess Armstrong) and her father (Nick Searcy).

“I’m 18!” Stacy argues.

“You’re going to end up pregnant!” her mother yells.

Stacy says that that her mother is just scared that she’s going to end up a loser “like you!”  Well …. yeah, Stacy, that’s kind of the point.  If your mother has experience with the life decisions necessary to become a loser, maybe you should listen to her warnings.

Anyway, Stacy runs away with a friend of her’s.  After her friend decides to go back home, Stacy hitches a ride with a trucker.  When the trucker stops off at a truck stop so he can get his brakes looked at, Stacy meets Richard Brown (Thomas Calabro, wearing a really bad wig).  Richard is long-haired and has got a tough guy beard and a cheesy tattoo of a heart on his scrawny forearm.  Stacy, of course, is totally smitten and she goes off with Richard and his “friend,” Eddie (Matt Letscher).

It doesn’t take long for us to figure out what Richard is bad news.  He carries a gun.  He’s financing his trip through stolen checks.  He might not even own the truck that he’s driving.  He and Eddie have a bizarre relationship in which Richard continually abuses Eddie but Eddie refuses to leave.  Richard is obviously a bad guy and we can all see it.  When Stacy finally calls her parents from the road, they immediately figure out that Stacy is in trouble.  However, it takes Stacy forever to figure it out because Stacy’s kind of an idiot.

I cringed a lot while watching Stolen Innocence, not so much because of the film’s depiction of Richard’s criminal lifestyle but because I used to have a definite weakness for bad boys and I could kind of understand what was going through Stacy’s mind when she first met Richard.  That said, I’m pretty sure that I would have figured things out a lot quicker than Stacy did.  Stacy quickly goes from being a somewhat sympathetic rebellious teenager to being someone who you really start to get annoyed with.  Oh, he’s threatening you with a gun?  Okay, that’s when you leave!  That’s when you start plotting your escape.  You don’t make excuses for him.  He’s financing his trip with stolen checks?  I’m sorry, is that not a red flag?  Add to that, as played by a miscast Thomas Calabro, it’s not like Richard is some boiling cauldron of charisma.  From the first minute we see him, with his long hair and his cowboy hat and his tattoo, the guy seems like a joke.

Eventually, Stacy does figure out the truth but, by that point, Richard and her are holed up in a motel room and Richard is exchanging gunfire with the FBI.  The film ends with a title card, reminding us that this was a true story.  “He’s not a bad person!” Stacy wails to the police.  I guess some people really are that stupid.