What Could Be Bothering Laurie?

Murder, lust, insanity, kidnapping, dead chickens--”All Around the Town” has everything you’d expect in a murder mystery and more.

So much more, in fact, that the movie, based on author Mary Higgins Clark’s bestseller, stumbles a bit in its white-knuckled eagerness to hit the ground running. Stick with the story, though, because the spooky twists and turns in the final half-hour are worth the trip.

The movie (airing at 9 tonight on PAX, with an encore at 9 p.m. Sunday) gives Natassja Kinski top billing as the suspicious wife of a hunky college professor (Kevin Jubinville), but it’s really one of the prof’s lissome students who’s at the center of things.

Newcomer Kim Schraner plays Laurie Kinmount, surely the most snake-bitten poor soul since Job. In a brief flashback to open the movie, Laurie is kidnapped as a toddler but is returned to her parents a couple of years later, suffering from horrendous nightmares.

Jumping to the present, Laurie appears to be a well-adjusted 21-year-old college student--until her parents are killed in an auto accident. That seems to awaken the demons of her past, causing Laurie to sprout multiple personalities. And some of those personalities aren’t too nice.

Her sister (Andrea Roth) asks a psychiatrist pal (Michael Shanks) to help, but it’s a struggle, possibly because he talks way too fast in the first third of the movie.

The college professor, meanwhile, begins getting some raunchy love letters at home, and he confronts Laurie with his suspicions.

Bad move.

Laurie is soon in enough trouble for 10 personalities, which is just about right. But in “All Around the Town,” all is not as it appears.