Lady In White (1988) That question posed in the subtitle of today's post is one we heard thousands of times from parents during our 30 years of toiling in the retail video movie business........
Answering it became quite a challenge for video store clerks, managers, owners and corporate movie buyers.....(all jobs which BQ held at one time or another.....)
The 'kids' we're talking about here were of the tween and teen age groups......(and not the little tykes whom parents could entertain with a "Strawberry Shortcake's Halloween" VHS tape.....)
For parents who didn't want their kids anywhere near R-rated, blood-dripping horror, the choices were few and far between.
The go-to recommendations usually consisted of the Walt Disney company's two misbegotten, botched forays into family-friendly horror......1980's "Watcher In The Woods" (see our 10/21/17 post) and 1983's "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (see our 10/14/17 post)........
The other prime choice was 1987's 'The Monster Squad'.....to which our utter shock and surprise, we discovered we haven't yet covered in this blog.....a severe omission we swear to rectify before the end of this month.
Today we'll turn our attention to writer-director-composer Frank LaLoggia's ambitious, entertaining and wildly uneven Spielbergian scare epic, "Lady In White"
Considering LaLoggia directed only two other horror films besides this one before dropping out of sight altogether, 'Lady In White' will stand as his magnum opus. a full fledged pull-the-stops-out ghost story,,,,,,, that throws in loving families, multiple vengeful ghosts, childhood nostalgia, cornball humor, a a serial killer of kids, and non stop thrills and scares cribbed from Spielberg and Hitchcock,
As if that isn't enough for you, the film clumsily attempts to also to shoehorn in vicious racism into its already boiling-over stew.
Little Frankie Scarlatti (the endearingly jug-eared Lukas Haas) endures one hell of long eventful night when his prankster schoolmates lock him in the class cloakroom.
He's visited by the ghost of a murdered little girl (re-enacting her death at the hands of her unseen serial psycho assailant)......and later, who should stop in but the in-the-flesh psycho himself, who for some unknown reason, interrupts his attempt at making Frankie the next of his many child victims.......
Director LaLoggia, clearly inspired by Steven Spielberg's deft ability to touch base with every age group in a movie audience, works overtime to serve up a 12 course meal for everybody here......
Everything he feverishly tosses into the film (floating ethereal spirits, a spooky reclusive old crone, warmhearted family fun 'n slapstick, a never ending Hitchcockian climax) never quite fits together as a whole. And he scores the film himself with overheated, insistent music that slavishly imitates John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith but lacks their unique melodic gifts
All of this lumpy goulash is still fun watch......until LaLoggia unwisely jams in a subplot of having the black janitor profiled by the casually racist community and falsely charged with the child killings. With all the other stuff going on, the film has barely any time to spend on this development.....it feels like it was dragged in from some other movie.....
Even worse, LaLoggia resolves this plot offshoot with a surprise horrific and tragic scene that's far more disturbing than any of his movie's supernatural doings......(for us, it left the film with a cruel aftertaste, especially in a story that sweats and strains to provide an overall feel good experience.)
Having vented on that moment, we'll still say that "Lady In White", with all its ungainly pieces cobbled together, remains a prime Halloween choice for older kids whose parents want their tween and teen's viewing to go no farther than PG-13. (And way more chilling to watch than those two warmed-over Disney efforts)......3 stars (***).
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