Lady In White

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

All this talk of great 80's kids horror films made me thirsty for more. I recently saw the article on Aint It Cool about them and I loved the other two but had never heard of this one.

First off, Lucas Haas you are great. Recently in Inception and Brick but for some reason I remember him most from Mars Attacks. I love it when you see someone well know pop up as a kid in an old movie, like last year when I saw Jodie Foster in The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane or Kurt Russell in Follow Me, Boys! I completely forgot that Haas was the kid in Witness. Well he sees a lot more than he should in this one too.

This movie felt kinda long, all the stuff with the ghosts and general halloween creepyness that goes through the first two thrids of the film had me thinking that yeah this would have been kinka spooky for kids. But then the last act came where you kind of forget about the ghosts once he realises that an adult figure he has long trusted is a pedophile and child murderer and goes chases after him at night through a haunted forest with a bow and arrow. The danger then becomes much more real and immediate and the climax was pretty spectacular.

One thing I noticed on the parental guide is, while it talks a lot about the spooky ghosts and briefly mentions that there is a murderer and child endangerment, it doesn't mention the fact that the mother of one of the victims goes to apologies to a wrongly accused old black school janitor, just after the town court found him not guilty and all charges had been dropped, but instead shoot him in the face with a revolver splattering his brains on a car window while his wife looks on from the other side. That was a rather huge shock. Points for.

Also I think it is impossible to see that "small american town square" backlot and not immediately think of Back to the Future. All that was missing was the clock.

All in all, a great film to terrorise children, I felt it was a bit long and don't have the nostalgia factor working for me, but still enjoyable for the last act.