Summaries

Synopsis

-This synopsis is based on the original director's cut of this film titled "The 13th Pig", not either one of the two re-edited alternate versions of it.-

The film opens as we see an old man feeding a corpse to a pen full of a sounder of 12 squealing pigs. This man is Zambrini (Marc Lawrence). He absentmindedly talks to the corpse as he prepares to toss it into the pigpen, explaining that the pigs were roaming free one night and they happened upon a drunk sleeping in a field. After eating the sleeping drunk, the pigs somehow gained a taste for human flesh and now, nothing else will satisfy them.

A Volkswagen Beetle is next seen being driven by a young woman down a series of increasingly isolated back roads. This woman is Lynn Webster (Toni Lawrence), and the song that plays over the opening credits advises her to "keep on driving", because "somebody's waiting for you somewhere down the road" and "someone will be there". After driving past a series of oil wells somewhere in rural California, she stops at a dead end road where she finds a small ramshackle roadside diner named "Zambrini's Diner". There is a sign in the diner's window that says "Waitress Wanted". As she steps out of her car, she is startled by the squealing of the pigs, but she continues inside, where she meets Zambrini. This is his diner and without much dialogue passing between them, he hires Lynn as a waitress and helps her get settled into a spare room in the back of the diner where she will stay. She finds a straight razor in the medicine cabinet in her room while she is preparing for bed. She has a nightmare that Zambrini enters her room and slashes her with the razor over and over again, but she wakes up and realizes that it was just a nightmare. She goes outside, starts looking around the property and hears the pigs squealing again, but before she can approach the pigpen, Zambrini grabs her and strictly tells her never to go looking around back there.

Zambrini's closest neighbors are a pair of elderly sisters, Miss Macy (Catherine Ross) and Annette (Iris Korn). They are in the habit of constantly calling the local sheriff, Dan Cole (Jesse Vint), and complaining to him about Zambrini's pigs. They can hear the pigs squealing from where they live, but they also claim that the pigs both run free at night and come right up to their house, and that Zambrini both murders people and feeds their corpses to the pigs, after which another pig will then appear in the pigpen.

While Lynn is serving customers at the diner, one of them named Ben Sharp (Paul Hickey) begins hitting on her, although she rejects his advances. He tells her Zambrini's backstory, about how he was a circus performer who fell from a high wire during a performance and was pronounced dead, only to be taken to the morgue where they discovered that he was not dead at all. Cole arrives and talks to Zambrini about the complaint that he got from the Macys, warning him to make sure that his 12 pigs are all in their pen and that they all stay there. Zambrini tells Cole that his only intention is to fatten up all of the pigs so that they can be taken away to be slaughtered for meat. Then Cole also meets Lynn, scaring her for a moment by telling her that she is driving a "missing car". It turns out that he is only referring to her registration, which is outdated. She promises to update it. Afterwards, Lynn makes a seemingly desperate phone call to her father, telling him that she had to leave, but that she will return to be with him as soon as she can. We, the viewers, only hear Lynn's side of this conversation.

Later, Zambrini pays an uninvited visit to the Macys, entering their home unannounced and terrifying them by wearing bizarre makeup that he used during his days as a circus performer.

Ben returns to the diner and asks Lynn out again, this time telling her that he has just discovered an out-of-place nurse's uniform that had been discarded in a field nearby, seemingly implicating Lynn, the stranger who has just arrived in town. Although Lynn tries to deny any connection to the uniform, she agrees to go out on a date with Ben. Unfortunately, Ben drives her to an isolated location and tries to force himself on her, seemingly willing to rape her if she does not comply with him. Fortunately she is rescued by Cole, who arrives on the scene and gives her a ride back to the diner.

Lynn then mysteriously invites Ben back to her room at the diner, apologizing for rejecting his advances. She puts on a show for him by taking off her clothes, revealing that she is wearing sexy lingerie, and she gets into bed with him; however, she then produces the straight razor and violently slashes Ben with it over and over again, killing him. Zambrini discovers the murder scene, with Lynn absentmindedly talking to herself and staring off into space next to Ben's corpse. Calming Lynn down, he cleans her up and takes her to his own bedroom, where he puts her to bed and she falls asleep. Afterwards he removes Ben's corpse, chops it into pieces with a meat cleaver and feeds the pieces to the pigs, who immediately eat all of them.

Lynn wakes up the next day seemingly with no memory of the incident, but she walks down the road to a pay phone where she places another phone call to her father (and again, only her side of this conversation is heard by we, the viewers). When she cannot reach him, she then runs back to the diner screaming in fear, "chased" by her half-remembering the dying screams of Ben and the threatening squealing of the pigs.

Ben is missed at work and Cole begins investigating his whereabouts, eventually leading him to the diner. He talks to the Macys, who claim to have seen him arrive at Zambrini's diner but never leave while, at the same time, the pigs "went crazy". Cole questions Zambrini again and tries to have a look at the pigpen, now attracted to it by the howling of Ben's dog, which has apparently located what is left of Ben's corpse with its sense of smell. A severed human hand is lying just outside the pigpen, but Zambrini manages to hide it by standing on top of it and Cole leaves none the wiser. Cole returns to the Macys, where a doctor (Walter Barnes) is doing a checkup on one of the sisters. Cole and the doctor have a conversation about Miss Macy's belief that Zambrini turns people into pigs by feeding their corpses to his pigs and the doctor tells him that the ancient Egyptians actually believed that this was possible and that a human turning into a pig was a step toward becoming divine. Lynn herself, however, proves impossible for Cole to question, staring off into space again and absentmindedly playing with her hair.

Cole is not the only one looking for Ben, though. That night, Zambrini discovers a group of young men prowling around his property, presumably Ben's co-workers at one of the oil wells. They find nothing, but beat up Zambrini and tell him to leave town or else.

Things start to completely unravel for Lynn when a man named Jess Winter (Jim Antonio) arrives in town and starts asking for her. He is eventually referred to the diner, where he approaches her in a non-threatening way and tells her that they have some "mutual friends" who do care about her. Our suspicions about Lynn are confirmed when he implies that Lynn has escaped from an insane asylum. He tells Lynn that she is welcome to come back, and Lynn seems happy at first, asking about a doctor there that she seemed attached to in a fatherly way. Zambrini overhears them talking and when Lynn goes to pack her things in order to go back with him, Winter talks privately to Zambrini, telling him that Lynn has escaped from an insane asylum and that he is a private investigator hired by their staff to find her and bring her back to continue her treatment. When Zambrini asks Winter about Lynn's father, he tells him that she has no father - her father, in fact, is dead.

Having by now become somewhat attached to Lynn, Zambrini does not want her to leave and asks her to stay. Lynn agrees, luring Winter into turning his back on her and then stabbing him to death over and over again with a large kitchen knife. The corpse is then dragged by Lynn over to the pigpen and tossed into it where, again, the pigs immediately eat it.

Lynn's world continues to inexorably close in on her when the insane asylum calls Cole, telling him that Winter is missing and that Lynn is an escaped mental patient with homicidal tendencies. Cole calls Zambrini at the diner and tries to warn him about Lynn, telling him to act as if nothing is wrong and wait for them to come and take Lynn into custody. Zambrini, however, immediately ignores this, instead telling Lynn that the police are coming for her and that they need to make it look as if she has left. When Lynn mentions her father, Zambrini repeats what Winter had told him: her father is dead. Lynn reacts violently to this statement and stabs Zambrini in the back once with the large kitchen knife, killing him instantly.

Knowing that the police are now coming for her and that there is nothing whatsoever that she can do to stop it, she makes one final phone call to her "father", and this time we, the viewers, hear a repeating recorded message on the phone at the other end telling her over and over again something that sounds like, "We're sorry, but you have reached a number that is disconnected or is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again. Thank you." In her insane mind, Lynn does not even hear this recording at all and instead thinks that she is talking to her dead father, weeping and telling him over and over again that she loves him. While Lynn is thus weeping and talking, the 12 human flesh-eating pigs, seemingly unseen by her and having somehow escaped from the pigpen, suddenly enter the diner and advance on her.

Cole finally arrives at the diner and, presumably, finds the bloody aftermath of the pigs having eaten the corpses of both Lynn and Zambrini. He later tells Ben's co-workers that Lynn had murdered her own father after enduring several years of sexual abuse from him, ultimately ending with him raping her, after which she went insane and killed him by stabbing him to death with a knife over and over again in a fit of rage. All of the pigs are finally rounded up and loaded into the back of a truck to be taken away, apparently to be slaughtered for meat as Zambrini had intended to do in the first place, but Cole is startled to find that, instead of the 12 pigs that he had counted on his previous visits to the diner, there are now 13 pigs in the sounder. Also found in the pigpen is the Egyptian ankh necklace that Lynn has worn around her neck throughout the entire film.