Foster on Film

In a small town in 1962, young Frankie Scarlatti (Lukas Haas) is locked in a school closet at night and sees the ghost of a girl reenact her murder.  Shortly after, the killer, with his face hidden, enters in order to retrieve incriminating evidence, finds Frankie, and strangles him.  But the boy is saved by his father (Alex Rocco) and the drunken janitor is wrongly arrested for the crime.  Frankie realizes that the dead girl is the daughter of the Lady in White, the local legendary ghost, and promises the girl that he will help her find her mother.  It also means that he is likely to uncover the killer, and the killer knows it as well.

Mixing horror and comedy is hard, particularly if you want both intact, and not a camp highbred.  Add in a dramatic examination of prejudice and a sweet nostalgia piece on small town life in the ’60s, and it is impossible to pull it off.  Then make it all a kid’s film just so you can show that reality has no claim on you.

Lady and White tries to be all things to all people.  An exceptionally skilled director could have put a few of the divergent elements together (though not all), but writer/director/producer/composer/and sometimes actor, Frank LaLoggia is not that man.  It’s as if he feared he’d never find funding again so had to put everything he’d ever thought of on film now.  But the parts don’t fit: It’s hard to laugh when the problems of racial injustice are hanging over the viewer’s head, and nothing can be all that scary after an idyllic slideshow of a bygone era in upstate New York.  The reality of the situation is destroyed by the slap stick routines of Frankie’s grandparents (the grandfather sets his pants on fire, bangs into a wall, and attempts to drown himself when his cigarettes are taken, only managing to hit his head and get wet).  Extremely emotional moments (such as the father’s tearful revelation of his fear of losing his son, and the reaction of the mother whose child is dead to the man she thinks is the murderer) have no power when surrounded by light-hearted scenes of childhood (the school teacher being shown how to limbo by her students, Frankie riding his bike into peculiar wet cement that doesn’t have any effect on him when it dries, even though it coated him and his bike).

With so many threads, some get forgotten.  The film starts with a grown-up Frankie, now a horror writer, returning to town and narrating the events of his youth.  But after popping in a few times to make sure the viewer has made the connection to A Christmas Story, he is never heard again.  The comedy trails off, and the story of the black man tried for murder gets little screen time.

While nothing in the movie is outstanding, if the elements had been pulled apart, LaLoggia could have made three good movies (the comedy and nostalgia should be kept together), though none of them would have been original.  The arrest of an innocent black man and the hostility of the public has been done numerous times, but it doesn’t seem that everyone has gotten the point, so another version wouldn’t hurt.  The ghost story has the basics to make a good movie, though it has been done more often than the prejudice tale.  A ghost needing people to solve a mystery before it can “go into the light” is old stuff, but there’s still life in the cliché.  However, the action taking place by a cliff over the ocean (with a number of people in the past and present either falling off or almost taking a dive) is too reminiscent of the iconic haunting film, The Uninvited, and that competition is too stiff for any movie.

Too many stories isn’t the only problem, just the biggest.  LaLoggia makes all the typical mistakes of inexperience.  He has the most flammable house in history that could only burn so quickly if it was soaking in gasoline.  Toward the end, the sickly sweet sentimentality would gag  Spielberg.  And there is even a Michael Myers “I’m not dead yet” moment.

For a low-budget indie film, Lady in White is shot well.  The effects work although they occasionally slip into the comical.  And the acting is good across the board.  If you are up for a mish-mash of storytelling topped with schmaltz, you’ll find this moderately entertaining.