MALL RATS

A second outing for Orlando, Florida, wheelchair-bound columnist Nick ``Stick'' Foster (Split Seconds), who's about to marry his Samantha, a wheelchair-bound attorney, when aged Martha Galliger sips the wedding punch she made herself—and succumbs. Who laced her cup with crack, PCP, and amphetamines? Suspicion falls on the wedding guests, of course—as well as on all the folks from the mall (where Stick is spending time researching a column): a possibly mob-connected pizza-maker; a shopkeeper in the federal witness relocation program; and a slew of ``mall rats,'' punk kids who hang out there. One of them, Billy Simpson, is soon fingered by the mall security guard as a participant in a drug-drop. Then the guard is killed; the security video is mangled by the cops; and Billy is hiding out in the mall ducts—with all the comforts he can steal from Sears. Eventually, Stick and friends will bust up the narcotics scam and the wedding brouhaha—but not before Stick and Billy are buried in sand and almost become a meal for an alligator. Good-natured do-gooders stuck in a tacky plot, with little of the wheelchair data that made Stick's debut interesting.