The Haunting of Lisa (1996)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

From my favorite movies..

As Good As It Gets

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

THE HAUNTING OF LISA is one of those ghost story TV movies that were all the rage in the 1990s. Cheryl Ladd, the former CHARLIE'S ANGELS actress, plays the mother of a young daughter experiencing visions of a sadistic murderer at work in the past. The title is something of a misnomer as this film is about psychic abilities and subtle ones at that; the ghosts which exist are merely those of the past. Plot-wise, it's more of a murder mystery, as Ladd attempts (badly) to figure of which of the supporting cast is the murderer. It's pretty low budget and drawn out; not really my cup of tea at all.

Not exactly recommendable for die-hard horror fans, since the film offers a tame mixture of drama & thriller, with only the added supernatural element occasionally venturing into horror territory. Little Lisa (Aemilia Robinson) has, just like her mother Ellen Downey (Cheryl Ladd), psychic abilities. We're talking communication with the dead here. Her contacts with the other side will lead the good guys onto the trail of a very bad serial killer. Performances aren't too bad, but the whole film is just unremarkable, boosted by some very cheap special (editing) effects. A by-the-numbers supernatural-tinted affair for bored housewives from the nineties as its target audience.

**SPOILERS** At first we have this nine year-old girl, Jodie Fisher, found brutally murdered in a local park by a park maintenance man which is bad enough. It's then that little Lisa Downey, Aemilia Robinson, starts to get these strong feeling and later visions that leads her to the old and abandoned park tool shed where is sees a manifestation, together with an angle-like Woman in White, of another similar murder of a little girl some thirty years ago. It turns out that the two girls Jodie and the girl, who's remains are later found under the floorboards, who was murdered in the tool shed were both killed by the same person!The movie "The Haunting of Lisa" is not all that different from most psychic movies about a person who can solve crimes with his, or in this case her, psychic powers. It's that the mother of the young girl Ellen Downey, Cheryl Ladd, as well as the grandmother and every other female member of her family have, or had, the same psychic powers. Ellan at first wants to keep her daughter out of the investigation of the Fisher murder knowing what it will entail for both her and little Lisa; unwanted and unbearable publicity. Were in fact later told by Ellan that her mother, Lisa's grandmother,was run out of town some thirty years ago when her psychic powers became known with the local and outraged townspeople accusing her of being a witch. Ellan doesn't want this to happen to her little Lisa.We have the usual set of suspects in both Jodie Fishers and the missing little girls, found buried under the tool shed, murders with Lisa reluctantly using her "gift" of psychic intuition to help the police track down the killer. Ellan in the meantime is also struggling with her fiancée the towns chief of police Mitch Graham, Duncan Regehr,in trying to get him off both her and Lisa's back in using the little girl as a human bloodhound in tracking down the multiple child murderer.There's a number of well placed false leads that has you so confused that by the time that the killer is finally revealed your still waiting for some kind surprise ending feeling that he's still out there. The killer himself is a real piece of work having had a very troublesome childhood, this all seen in a number of flashbacks, where he was made to feel unwanted by his step-father a gong-ho US Army Captain who almost beat him to death. The movie has a twist ending where the two murders are connected by a single strand of evidence, uncovered by little Lisa, that tied the two killings, and who committed them, together.The best scene in the movie was when the killer finally came out into the open and revealed himself in what, in the almost unbelievable overacting on his part,has to be an Academy Award winning performance. Huffing puffing and sweating uncontrollably, like he just finished an 12 hour shift shoveling coal in a boiler room, the killer became so incoherent and crazy that he just about stole the acting honors in the movie with just that one amazing two minute opus.

The title of this movie is a bit of a misnomer. This isn't really about a haunting, at least not as I understand the word. It is, however, a passable suspense flick about a young girl (Lisa, well played by young Aemelia Robinson) who receives mysterious visions about the murder of a young child, and whose visions set in motion a search for the killer, who may also be responsible for other deaths and who may now need to kill Lisa to avoid being caught.The identity of the killer is well kept as an open question for most of the movie. You eventually reach the point at which you can narrow it down to two suspects, but you aren't really sure who it is until it's revealed.Cheryl Ladd put on a decent enough performance as Lisa's mom, Ellen, who shares her daughter's psychic-like powers. Criticisms? Well, the movie caricatures both TV reporters and the Catholic Church a little bit. Even given the aggressiveness of the media, I don't think they'd film a private conversation between a mother and her young daughter and play the tape on television, and I honestly don't believe that a Catholic priest (Father Eakin, played by Don Allison) would intrude on a family with no connection to his church and who are not even Catholic.As I said to begin, this is passable - nothing more, really. 5/10