Lady in White [dir. Frank LaLoggia]

Before The Sixth Sense (1999), in which 11 year old Haley Joel Osment talked to ghosts, there was Lady in White (1988) where 11 year old Lukas Haas talked to ghosts. And there is a 11 year gap between these two films, talk about coincidence.

Of course this is where most of the similarities end. The Sixth Sense was a deliberately tamped down, brooding journey while Lady in White is steeped in the cheeriness of 80's Hollywood.  Where M. Night Shyamalan's film immersed you in its atmosphere by being perversely restrained, Lady in White smacks you in the face with archetypes so broad they appear manufactured.

The film is set in early 60's still innocent America where Lukas Haas' Frankie is a small town schoolboy and the youngest child in an Italian-American family. This is of course the sort of small town where everyone is a neighbor, all shops are adorned with the names of their proprietors and the church is full on Sundays. This is also the Italian-American family where first gen migrants grandpa and grandma constantly bicker at each other in Italian (there's a running joke about grandpa sneaking smokes), widowed dad dotes on his sons and saying "damned" or "bloody" is considered unacceptable swearing.

When Frankie is locked inside the cloakroom after school as a prank on Halloween, he sees the ghost of a young girl playing out her death. There is also a shadowy intruder that comes to retrieve something from the grate in the room, and when he comes across Frankie, he attempts to strangle the boy. After being revived by his father, Frankie comes to hear of a series of child killings over the years; he also discovers that the first victim Melissa is the ghost he saw in the cloakroom. In due course, Frankie discovers that the spectral Melissa's search for her mother is related to the dreaded "lady in white" that lives in the cottage adjoining the seaside cliffs. He decides to help Melissa "find" her mother and unravel the mystery of her (and the other children's) death.

A lot of Lady in White's charm is tied in to its lead star Lukas Haas, who thankfully embodies the combination of innocence and tenacity of his character without coming across as precocious. Under LaLoggia's careful direction of Haas, you can believe Frankie's bond of affection his family, his penchant for imagination (early in the film he is called on to tell a spooky story in class for Halloween) and his desire to do good by Melissa.

But for me, the film does not succeed as a whole. The script is packed with too many horror film cliches and subtlety is sorely lacking. The tone of Lady in White is wobbly - the juvenile comedy interludes with the grandparents and the general squeaky-clean treatment would have made for a family-friendly PG affair, but after a point, the film suddenly shows us a rather graphic shooting and some intense child endangerment scenes. The identity of the killer is all too obvious, but the manner in which Frankie discovers it is unconvincing. Worse, the dependence on dated and awkward optical effects to depict the supernatural phenomena becomes a distraction, especially during the climax which looks amateurish.

Given the positive reviews I had seen from reliable sources - including Roger Ebert and Richard Scheib [Moria Reviews] I was hoping to be a good deal more charmed by this ghost story than I eventually was. But it does have its engaging bits, Lukas Haas being the most prominent of them.