**SPOILERS** Effective little thriller about a young woman Ellen Collier, Paula Abdual, who after being viciously raped is stalked, as well as her friends, by the same sicko rapist. Breaking into her condo one evening the serial rapist, who already raped 15 women, sadistically rapes the terrified woman and promises her that he'll be back for seconds.With the police stymied to who the rapist is Ellen's life falls apart as she's unable to have any kind of relationship, social or business, with a man.
Meeting Young handsome and caring Jerry Braskin, Adrian Pasdar, in her's condo's laundry room Ellen slowly starts to get out of the shell that she put herself in after she was raped. As luck would have it Jerry is not only sweet and kind to Ellen but is also in business as the owner of a car repair shop which he invites her to enter into a partnership with him.
Ellen's friend and business agent Madge Jaynes, Susan Rattan, is not all that impressed or charmed by Jerry an feels that there's something very strange and dangerous about him. But Ellen, who confided in Jerry about her being raped and Jerry in return tells her that he's an ex-convict, refuses to break up and even has an ongoing sexual affair with him feeling that Jerry paid his dues to society and should't have his record as a convicted criminal held against him.
The movie "Touched by Evil" keeps you guessing to who and what Jerry really is but the evidence points to what he told Ellen: he's a man who paid for what he did and is now going straight. There's a number of incidents in the film that both implicates and exonerates Jerry as the serial rapist but it's not until the last ten minutes that you, and Ellen, finally realize what the truth is about him.
Worth watching just for Miss. Abudal's performance which is a lot better then you would have expected since you never think of her being anywhere as good an actress as she is a singer. Paula does a very convincing job as a rape victim and suffering from the post traumatic shock in the way rape affects a woman after she survives it.
The story itself is a bit off since there's a lot of loose ends in it that are left unexplained. Like the rapist obsession with Ellen by constantly tormenting her, he never did that to any of his other victims, even after he went out in the night to rape other women. It's also never explained what he had to do with a string of burglaries since it seemed that he took nothing from Ellen's condo which had a lot of valuable items in it after he raped her so why burglarize his other victims?
