Description
A man named Zambrini (Marc Lawrence) lives in a rural California area and operates a small, isolated diner catering to local oil workers. He also feeds fresh corpses (apparently acquired by grave robbing) to a pen of 12 pigs he keeps behind the diner. Two spinster neighbors, Miss Macy and Annette (Catherine Ross, Iris Korn) suspect Zambrini of feeding human bodies to the pigs, but cannot convince sheriff Dan Cole (Jesse Vint), who investigates their claims but cannot get Zambrini to admit to anything. Miss Macy tells him that whenever Zambrini feeds a new body to the pigs, the next day there's a new pig in the pen.
Into this mix comes a young woman named Lynn Webster (Toni Lawrence), a stranger who comes to the diner looking for work and a place to stay. Zambrini immediately gives her a room and a job as a waitress, asking no questions about who she is or where she comes from. After a nightmare where Zambrini attacks her with a strait razor, Lynn attempts to investigate the hog pen behind the diner and is intercepted by Zambrini, who ominously warns her never to go back there.
Lynn attracts the attention of local oil worker Ben (Paul Hickey), who pursues her for a date. After politely rebuffing his advances, Lynn finally relents after Ben reveals that he found an abandoned nurse's uniform in a nearby field, suggesting that Lynn is on the run from something that she does not want revealed. After Ben takes her out in his truck and attempts to rape her, Lynn invites him back to her room at the diner and murders him with a strait razor. Zambrini finds her and cleans up all evidence of the crime, feeding Ben's dismembered body to the pigs. Lynn seems to have only fleeting memories of her crime, and she continues making one-sided phone calls to her father, promising to return to him.
A man named Jess Winter arrives in town searching for Lynn. Once he makes contact with her at the diner, he reveals to Zambrini that Lynn has escaped from a mental institution; she is a dangerously disturbed psychopath as a result of being raped by her own father, whom she stabbed to death. Winter tries to get her to go back with him, and she agrees, but when Zambrini tells her that he wants her to stay, Lynn stabs Winter to death.
Winter's disappearance triggers an investigation that results in Lynn's past being revealed to Dan Cole. When he discovers she is an escaped mental patient, he calls the diner to warn Zambrini before rushing out there to apprehend Lynn. Instead, Zambrini warns her and attempts to hide her from the police, but before he can get her to leave, she stabs him to death. She makes one last phone call to her father, and this time we hear that she's been talking to an automated recording for a disconnected phone number. Suddenly, the pigs invade the diner, presumably attacking Lynn. Cole arrives on the scene too late and discovers the aftermath of the attack, but as the pigs are being loaded into a truck the next day, he realizes that there are now 13 full sized pigs instead of 12.
