Lady in White (1988), directed by Frank LaLoggia from his own script; starring Alex Rocco, Len Cariou, Lukas Haas, and Katherine Helmond.
I first saw this film sometime in the VCR era, after reading reviews by pundits of the era raving about the performance of Lukas Haas as the main character. Recently, upon searching this title, I was surprised to find that it’s now considered a "cult" film, with its own deluxe, 2016 Shout Factory! Blu-Ray release that includes a “director’s cut.” (I bought the plain old DVD of the theatrical version about ten years ago.)
IMHO, I’m not sure what’s particularly odd or “cultic” about this fine film; for me it’s simply a well-crafted, old-fashioned ghost story, recalling the 1944 Ray Milland classic, The Uninvited. Indeed, like The Uninvited, spectral activity arrives wrapped up in a murder mystery that needs to be solved for the ghosts to move on.
Lady starts with the by-now cliched opening of a famous author returning to visit the old hometown (or neighborhood) he hasn’t seen in years. Director LaLoggia plays the author, a Stephen King-like, best-selling horror writer. His hometown is called Willowpoint Falls, a seaside hamlet in rural New York, and he’s returned to visit some old graves in the town cemetery. In voiceover, he begins to tell a story about something very memorable that happened to him in the fall and winter of 1962.
The story then switches to Halloween of that year, and we meet the author as Frankie Scarlatti (Haas), a goofy ten-year-old Italian-American kid living on a small farm with his widowed father Al (Rocco, who played Moe Green in The Godfather); his big brother Geno, and his ancient Old World grandparents, who shout at each other a lot in Italian. At school, Frankie is bullied for being “weird” (mostly because he has big ears and loves horror stories).
On Halloween morning, he goes off to school in a dime-store Dracula mask, which he wears on top of his head throughout the day’s memorable events. (I’m pretty sure that Jordan Peele included an homage to Frankie and his mask in his recent film, Us (2019), which features a kid who habitually wears a Halloween mask on top of his head.) After school, some bullies lock Frankie in his classroom’s cloakroom, and he realizes to his horror that no one knows he’s there. As night falls, Frankie witnesses a horrifying sight: the ghost of a little girl who is strangled to death in the cloakroom by an unseen person.
Shortly afterward, a very real man in a dark mask enters the cloakroom and strangles Frankie until he nearly dies. He blacks ut, but is rescued by Al, who forced the bullies to tell him where his son was when Frankie didn't come home from school.
Later, Frankie discovers an old newspaper that reports about a series of child murders that occurred in Willowpoint ten years before, and realizes that one of the victims, Melissa, was the same little girl he saw murdered in the cloakroom. As the plot unfolds, he also discovers that the little girl’s murder is connected to the so-called "Lady in White," a legendary ghost who haunts the tall seaside cliffs at the edge of town.
Help Me Find My Mother!
Melissa appears to Frankie several times and implores him to help her find her mother, whom Frankie eventually realizes is the Lady in White. Meanwhile, the child killer is still on the loose, and Frankie and his brother Geno unknowingly possess a physical clue to his identity. The killer knows what they have and this sets up the film’s creepy climax.
Lady clocks in at two hours and takes great care to set up a whole world peopled with small town archetypes: the old-maid schoolteacher, the family priest, the gruff sheriff, the mean bully kid who’s the town terror. All of these characters take up a lot of space, but I wouldn’t say that Lady is a slow film; it just covers a lot of ground. For instance, there’s a whole subplot involving Willie, the black school security guard who was on duty when Frankie was attacked. He is--of course--accused unjustly of the crime, and he pays a heavy price for it.
All of which is shot and framed very beautifully by DoP Russell Carpenter, who, ten years later, would win an Oscar as DoP for James Cameron’s Titanic. Sadly, director LaLoggia only did one other film after this one, and his IMDb listing doesn’t say what happened to him after that. This interview with the site Halloween Love gives a lot of background on the making of Lady and says that LaLoggia now lives in Italy.
I still enjoyed this film upon rewatching it after many years, but this time I did notice some of its flaws, chiefly in the plotting. It strains credibility, for instance, that Frankie is unaware of the child murders that occured only ten years before, until he finds the old newspaper. It also challenges credibility that Frankie is the only one to connect the legend of the Lady in White with the murders, when she died very publicly after learning about the murder of Melissa. Also, at one point, we learn from the sheriff that they’ve known all along that Melissa was killed in the cloakroom, yet they never thought to look in a grate that contains a crucial piece of physical evidence.
That said, it’s a pretty good mystery that’s well worth seeing to the end. There's a lot to appreciate in the great spooky atmosphere, the little slice of mid-century Americana, the film work of Carpenter and LaLoggia, and the letter-perfect performance of Haas as "weird" little Frankie.
