Lady in White (1988)

               “Offensive” is a strong word, especially when applied to a PG-13 movie, but here it’s apt. This movie made me very angry several times over the course of almost two hours. I cursed aloud at the screen at least twice. Which is going to take some explaining since it’s a perfectly competent movie. I don’t think it has any severe structural problems, the plot makes sense even if it’s not always clear in the way it conveys information, and after a second viewing I calmed down quite a bit. That first watch was a doozy, though, and one thing I got mad about genuinely is horrible even the second time through.

              We have another instance where the financing behind a movie is more interesting than its plot. The film was written and directed by Frank LaLoggia, who I’d never heard of either. He’d directed one movie previously, the 1981 film ‘Fear No Evil.’ The IMDB plot summary of that movie reads ‘High school student turns out to be personification of Lucifer. Two arch angels in human form (as women) take him on.’ That movie made $3 million off of a $1.5 million budget. They’d raised money from individual investors over the course of several years and while they’d originally wanted to do a comedy they decided that a horror movie would be more likely to make its money back. Again we find the wisdom of Sam Raimi. This (relative) success didn’t get LaLoggia’s foot in the door, as the financing for this next movie not only took several more years, they did it by selling penny stocks.

              To rip from the wiki: “The film was entirely financed through a penny stock offering, New Sky Communications, a public company set-up by LaLoggia and his cousin Charles M. LaLoggia, traded initially on NASDAQ for 10 cents a share. It was the first and only occasion that a single, feature film was financed in this manner.” The credited budget was $4.7 million and it made only $1.7 million in domestic receipts, but the Wiki is careful to note that the movie made its budget back before it even opened by selling the foreign rights to Samuel Goldwyn Productions and domestic distribution to New Century Vista. Still, $1.7 million is a pretty low box office return and it wasn’t until 1995 that he was able to direct again with ‘Mother,’ starring Diane Ladd and Olympia Dukakis, of all people.

              The cast has a couple of names in it. The movie focuses on a young boy named Frankie Scarletti, played by Lukas Haas. I’d do my usual thing of referring to how young he was in this movie, but he’d been a child actor for four years by that point. His father is played by Alex Rocco, who’s always going to be Moe Greene from ‘The Godfather’ to me. Len Cariou plays family friend Phil Terragrossa, who had a decent screen career but broke out on Broadway. He won a Tony as the original Sweeney Todd opposite Angela Lansbury. I guess I should mention Jason Presson as Frankie’s older brother Geno. He’s not good in this but he was one of the main three kids in ‘Explorers,’ that’s worth something.

              A lot of the problems I have with this movie are going to come down to tone. This is a movie about a serial child abuser with the sensibility of a Disney Channel original. It opens in what was then the present day with a grown-up version of our main character coming back to his hometown for the first time in a while. We don’t ever get a good look at his face because it’s the director playing the part to get out of the cost of another actor. For the first few minutes everything is ADR over the backs of people’s heads or footage of a cab driving along as the movie helpfully lays out that he’s now a famous horror author. He asks the driver to stop by a small cemetery on the way, and when he gets out of the taxi the driver follows him in. And then asks him who here’s there to see. Which is weird. We then flash back to the fall of 1962 for the rest of the movie and the narration begins.

              My stance on narration is well-established: I think most examples of it show an inability by either the director or the writer (in this case he’s both) to convey information in an organic way, either visually or through dialogue. With narration I’m always wondering in the back of my head if we have another ‘Blade Runner’ situation, where someone in the production was convinced that audiences were going to be lost if the film didn’t pre-digest the information and vomit it directly into their mouths. I tend to think the narration here was always meant to be included because there are several long, dialogue-free sequences with narration over the top that sure seem to have been shot with the expectation of voiceover. There’s even one piece of plot-relevant information that is only conveyed through this narration, so if that was added at the last second it was a pretty big screenwriting miss.

              On the other hand there is also a decent set of reasons to think it might have been added in post, not least of which being that there’s no scene at the end of the movie to complete the wrap around section. There are those few minutes at the beginning, narration over the course of the movie, and then it just ends. There’s also the fact that while the movie is set up as the flashback of our main character, several times he even directly comments on the visuals on screen, there are plenty of sequences in the movie that he wasn’t present for and would have no way of knowing about. There’s obvious stuff, like his father talking with members of the police, or a press conference on the steps of a courthouse after grand jury deliberations, or the not-Lady in White traipsing home alone through the woods at night. None of them are as mystifying as a single camera movement, though. About halfway through the movie Frankie meets up with this ghost girl he’s been seeing. She pulls an ornament from a Christmas tree while asking for his help, and he steps forward to take a look at it. The camera then switches to a view outside of the bay windows they’re standing in front of and slowly pulls back to reveal that Frankie isn’t talking to anyone!

              There are two reasons I’m confused by this. First we know she’s a ghost and that an outside observer would likely not see her, why is this being established yet again? Second this is supposed to be Frankie’s story that he’s telling a random cab driver, did he pause in the middle of talking about the ghost to pose a hypothetical scenario about what a witness would have seen? I’m not going to pitch a fuss about every time the movie shows us something that it technically shouldn’t but there’s no need to rub our noses in how much it’s breaking format.

              So on to the movie itself. One of the first notes I wrote is “it took me 10 minutes to hate this movie.” This is because the opening does a very good job of establishing the tone of the rest of the film, and that tone is sub-Spielberg made-for-tv movie. The 1962 as presented here is full-on “Leave it to Beaver” nonsense. We see happy butchers sweeping steps, kids on bikes ringing bells at each other, a paperboy riding away from a customer chasing him down the street for his paper, a sassy café waitress handing out scraps to dogs from the back of the kitchen, it lays it on thick. And the score is all strings and woodwinds and sounds like a bad episode of “The Brady Bunch.” I’m sure there’s a term for when the music follows along and punctuates the movements and actions on screen, like quiet little strings when a character is sneaking or a flute trill when they steal something. “Tom & Jerry” shit. It’s all over the movie and makes the murder and racism really pop out.

              Frankie Scarletti is a skinny kid who fancies himself a writer, so they’re also working the Stephen King territory hard. This comes up exactly three times in the movie and the first was during that opening section. He both is and isn’t a nerd, he’s bullied by a couple of the kids in class but he also punches one of them out. He has a very annoying older brother and a widower father who runs the local ironworks. One day after school, on Halloween no less, some bullies trick him into getting locked in the class cloakroom over the weekend. I will point out that in 1962 Halloween was on a Wednesday, but we’re moving on. It’s also established that the school was about to start work on the building’s heating, which is kind of plot relevant. Frankie eventually gives up on trying to break out and falls asleep, dreaming about his dead mother. I wrote all sorts of notes about the movie having a dream sequence inside of a flashback but it gets a lot sillier later on so now this seems almost quaint. Eventually he sticks himself atop a shelf in a back corner and admittedly the way this is shot makes for a striking image, which is why this was the cover for the home video release.  

              As the church clock tower strikes ten a little ghost girl wanders into the room through the locked door. It’s a terrible effect, by the way, just a semi-transparent layer laid over the top. It makes ‘The House Where Evil Dwells’ look … well, it doesn’t make it look good but it’s not any worse than this. She starts talking to somebody still outside the cloakroom and their conversation establishes a few things: she knows her killer, he’d bought her the dress she’s wearing, and he sings to himself so much that she’s learned his favorite tune, “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” As she’s twirling around singing the song she sees Frankie and they stare at each other for a few moments, then she darts away. She tells whoever brought her there that she’s scared and wants to go home, then she gets murdered by the invisible killer. As she’s screaming for her mom somebody rips at her clothes and the camera follows a skittering sound from her to a nearby grate in the floor. It wasn’t until the second viewing that I understood this indicated that the killer had accidentally lost something down there. After the girl is dead he drops something else down the drain which I think is eventually revealed to be her barrette, though I still have no idea why he did that. The invisible killer picks up the body and carries it out through the still-closed door.

              As Frankie is busy processing this somebody who’s not a ghost breaks into the cloakroom. He’s an adult in dark clothes and a hood. The kid pushes himself further back into a corner and pulls a Dracula mask down over his face. The figure, dressed all in black, starts to pull up the grate and then Frankie makes a noise. The figure demands to know who Frankie is, and when he starts explaining he gets pulled down and strangled to death. His soul separates from his body and flies over the town. He gets a bunch of visions of people feeling sad about his death, then he’s at a soundstage mockup of a cemetery and the little ghost girl is there. She says her name is Melissa and that her mom is lost, then Frankie wakes back up because his father is there giving him mouth-to-mouth. Not sure any of this entirely works, but fine.

              Genuinely nothing much happens for half an hour. The police arrest the janitor since he was drunk in his office that night (and we will get back to this), Frankie slowly recovers, the ghost starts playing around with the stuff in his room at night, and we see an older woman with red hair staring through his window at night. Very little of this pays off. We’re also informed that Frankie nearly became the 12^th victim of a serial killer of children that’s been around for about a decade. Turns out Melissa was his first victim back in 1951. Near the hour mark it occurs to Frankie to follow up on that whole ‘almost being killed’ thing and thinks to go look in the grate. He pulls out a bunch of little trinkets as well as a plastic barrette and an old class ring.

              While visiting his dad at work he overhears the visiting police chief admit that they’re going to railroad the janitor and hang all eleven murders on him. He also confides in Frankie’s dad that the first victim was killed in the cloakroom, something kept from the papers but which we already knew. Family friend Phil then wanders by and Frankie unloads everything to him about the ghost he saw and in doing so realizes that since the class ring was the only thing down in the grate that wasn’t a kid’s then it must belong to the killer. Says all of this out loud to the guy. I will simply point out that Roger Ebert mentioned in his review of this very film his Law of Conservation of Characters, “Any main character whose purpose is not readily apparent must be more important than he or she seems.” Maybe keep an eye on Phil.

              For dumb reasons Frankie then loses the ring and his idiot brother Geno finds it. For the rest of the movie any investigation work about the owner of the ring is done by him and not Frankie. This does pay off in the climax so I’m begrudgingly allowing it. We get a scene where the bullies from earlier successfully peer-pressure Frankie into exploring the old, abandoned house on the cliff, which is when I cursed at the movie out loud for the first time. Minor shenanigans ensue and then all three are chased out of the house by that woman with red hair who was staring through Frankie’s window before.

              Here I have to be retroactively angry, because what the movie is doing is making you think this is the titular Lady in White, but eventually it’s revealed to be a mentally ill but alive woman. And that’s fine as far as it goes, classic misdirection, but the movies cheats since this non-ghost fucking floats down the stairs while her clothes flutter in the nonexistent wind. It’s one thing to imply that a person is a ghost in a ghost movie, it’s another entirely to simply lie about it.

              More nothing happens, then eventually Frankie and Geno see the little girl ghost in their bedroom and when she leaves at 10pm they realize she’s reenacting her murder again. And I will give the movie a little credit, this isn’t a stupid idea. Following a ghost who loops her own death to try to determine her killer isn’t a new idea but it’s a step up for this movie. I was annoyed during the first viewing when I wondered why the ghost was suddenly following Frankie around, but then I remembered that he’s been carrying that little barrette he dug out from the grate around with him and she’s attached to that. It even pays off at the end, so I guess that’s one point back to the movie. They follow up behind the ghost and catch up to her floating dead body as the killer carries it out of the school. Geno gets glass stuck in his shoeless foot like the idiot he is so it’s only Frankie who follows the ghost out to the cliff by that abandoned house from earlier. He watches as she wakes up when she’s about to be thrown from the cliff. She screams as she’s tossed down, which apparently extends her ghostly influence far enough that the ruined house is now back in pristine ghostly condition and a woman with blond hair and a flowing white dressing gown emerges, calling for her daughter. She sees Melissa’s lifeless body at the base of the cliff and throws herself down as well.

              The next day Geno is home sick from school and Frankie gets picked up after class by the family friend Phil to go practice archery. It was established earlier that this was something they did together as a hobby, and if you’re anticipating some arrow-based excitement in the climax it doesn’t pay off at all. I think the director just liked archery. While this is going on Geno fishes out an old yearbook and discovers that the initials on that old class ring belong to Phil! Immediate cut to Phil saying that he and Frankie need to have a talk, but they’ll shoot one last arrow first. As he’s coaching Frankie he leans in really close and the camera cuts in to show him whispering in the boy’s ear, almost nuzzling him. Pretty creepy. As they’re packing Phil starts to whistle “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” which clues in Frankie. He has no poker face so Phil realizes he’s been spotted immediately.

              A chase ensues through the woods that ends up with both of them back at the house by the cliff. Phil is strangling Frankie to death (again) when someone conks him on the back of the head. Frankie wakes up in a bed surrounded by candles with the woman with red hair looming over him. There’s an exposition dump as she explains that she’s the actual ghost Lady in White’s sister and she’s been wandering the cliffs for years looking for her. So I guess it’s just a coincidence that there is in fact a ghost Lady in White and that her sister also likes wandering the cliffs in a pale nighty? Anyway soon Phil wakes up and strangles her to death directly in Frankie’s face. During the struggle he knocks down some candles and the house goes up in flames. While he’s trying to toss the boy off the cliff the for-reals Lady in White shows up and spooks him over the edge. Frankie had earlier returned the barrette to the house, so ghost Melissa emerges from the flames and she and her mom, happily reunited, spiral heavenward.

The effects are not flawless.

              Phil’s not quite done yet and tries to claw Frankie back over the cliff edge. This is when Geno leads their dad and the cops to the rescue. Soon enough Frankie’s pulled back to safety and Phil spurns his friend’s helping hand and flings himself to his death in shame. There’s a ten-second camera pullback to show everyone watching the burning house and boom, we are done, roll credits.

              There are holes in this mystery, but not an overwhelming amount. If he’d noticed that his class ring was missing, why did it take Phil almost eleven years to go looking for it? It’s stated that he was worried they’d find it while working on the school heating system, but that means that he knew a piece of evidence was down there and didn’t do anything about it for over a decade? If there was a child murderer running around connected to a small town I’m pretty sure all the local kids would know about it, they wouldn’t be finding out for the first time from a newspaper. Ghost Melissa was talking to the invisible killer later revealed to be Phil like they knew each other, says he bought the dress she’s wearing and that he sings that song often enough that she’s memorized it. At no point do they address this, and they easily could’ve. Maybe he’d been dating her mom, he’s been questioned at the time and dismissed as a suspect but the sheriff remembers there was always some doubt, so when Geno comes running with this silly ring accusation, he thinks there’s maybe something to it … it’s stupidly easy to work in, is my point. Overall, though, while they fell down a bit on the ghost side of things (I still say they cheated with the dead lady’s sister) the straight mystery side of it played generally fair. It just wasn’t a very interesting mystery.

              So why was I so angry? Because everything above is surrounded by the cheesiest, most anodyne faux aw-shucks shit and it does not do a single thing interesting with the contrast. Instead it just constantly grates. I didn’t even mention Frankie’s Italian grandparents who have silly sub-sitcom fits of boobery sprinkled in between all the child molestation. I counted eight different scenes featuring these two scattered over the two hours this movie runs containing such knee-slappers as: grandparents argue over smoking, grandmother says something in American English wrong, grandfather pretends to drown himself over being forbidden from smoking and ruins his favorite watch, that sort of thing. My favorite is a scene where Geno get a thermometer shoved up his ass the scene before a civil rights murder.

              Didn’t I mention the exactly five scenes where this movie turns an unflinching eye to the scourge of racism in the 1960’s? Hell, I’ll bump it up to six scenes because their father sees a few seconds of a tv news report on desegregation. Remember that janitor who was arrested for assaulting Frankie, the one they decided to pin the murders on? He was a Black guy named Willy Williams, and this is in a movie that drops the n-word less than 20 minutes in to remind you it’s 1962. He’s arrested at the 36-minute mark and he’s arraigned for the eleven murders at 42 minutes. Frankie’s dad is on the phone with his cop friend when it happens and is incredulous that people think he did it. For some reason I decided that the rest of the mystery was going to play out as a backdrop to the trial, Frankie’s family was going to learn some lessons, and we were going to get a very 1988 look at race relations. This did not happen. There is a scene at a church where a woman whose son was killed by the serial killer yells at Willy’s wife. There’s a scene where Frankie’s dad drives the wife and her family home and expresses sympathy. Then at 89 minutes Willy gets released since the grand jury refuses to indict him, which I call entire bullshit on. Eleven white kids dead and a Black guy gets arrested for it in 1962? That man is going to jail. The movie tries to distract us by having the woman who yelled in church walk up to Willy and shoot him in the head, but after this scene is over none of that is ever mentioned again, so I guess never mind. Somewhere in all of this is when I swore aloud at the screen for the second time.

              This movie was infuriating to me because it was this inedible combination of corny, saccharine, sub “Full House” buffoonery with sudden, almost random spikes of sexual violence and racism. They would have these clashing tones in the same scenes, pulling my brain one way and then another constantly. I don’t need a scene where a character gets a clue about a serial killer butting up against a family casually eating while their wacky grandfather falls down in the bathtub. I’ve also never seen such a clear example of how authors choose whose stories get to be told. The first time through I was genuinely confused for a good twenty minutes after seeing Willy’s arraignment because there wasn’t a scene following up on either him or his family. I couldn’t quite understand that the movie was going to bring this topic up and then absolutely refuse to address it any further. Then that story ends with him getting killed anyways for the audience to learn … presumably something? And here’s a fun fact: one of these scenes, Frankie’s dad driving his family home from church, wasn’t even in the theatrical version. It got added back in for the director’s cut.

              So no, I don’t think I’m going to recommend that anyone track down a copy of ‘Lady in White.’ I don’t know if it’s streaming anywhere and I don’t care. I would schedule a double feature of this and the 1974 ‘Ghost Story’ to see which I hated more but I’m not going to do that to myself.