Day Five: Lady in White

So the last few days I feel like I have hit stride in my quest for ten days of horror. I hit a small speed bump with Children of the Corn, and since then I recovered well with The Frighteners and Sweeney Todd, so I felt like I needed to keep the momentum going. I have owned Lady in White by Frank LaLoggia for a few years now, and never got around to watching this on DVD. I think that I have seen this movie close to ten times on HBO when I was growing up back in the late 80s, early 90s.

The funny thing is that with all the times I have seen the movie, I do not remember the first ten minutes at all. Maybe I never watched the first ten minutes before since it was on HBO, I probably came in late each time watching it. Without the cable box built-in guide, we had to rely on TV Guide or the local paper for our show times, so catching a movie on time often didn't happen unless you rented the movie.

So I wanted to do this movie mainly because I have great memories of it from when I was a child, and because it takes place over Halloween. The story centers around Frankie Scarlatti (played by Lukas Haas), a budding author in grade school who is considered weird by his fellow students. He begins to have visions of a young girl that had some traumatic experience that somehow links to his life.

I really like this movie... it has the typical 80s fluff feel but still manages to also have a more ominous presence to it. This was a pretty low budget independent film, but does not show it. The movie's effects for the time are really good, the acting in the movie is probably as good as you're going to get for kids, and the adult acting is perfectly serviceable. This movie provides you with a relatively good twist, back from a time where twists were not yet trendy. The twist really pays off because of the time and effort that is taken in telling the story and setting up the characters. Even though I would not classify this movie as a true Horror, I truly recommend this movie for anybody trying to get into the Halloween mood.

Click here to read reviews of Lady in White