Critic Reviews

LaLoggia shares his unique vision with the viewer through an imaginative and innovative visual style that flows skillfully from traditional naturalism into surreal dreamlike fantasies and back again without ever seeming gratuitous or clumsy. A remarkable film.

Frank LaLoggia's 1988 film scared the living hell out of yours truly with its singular combination of hometown horrors and operatic tragedy.

Here are the bones of an ordinary ghost story. But the writer and director Frank LaLoggia brings them to life with exceptional vitality.

This probably is as good a nightmare as any impressionable boy could have and still be suspenseful enough to get most adults’ hearts going.

Although the results are a bit overextended, the film is still something of a rarity nowadays: an evocative, poetic horror film without a trace of gore (and in this respect, closer to a Val Lewton film of the 40s like The Curse of the Cat People than any contemporary models).

Lady in White tells a classic ghost story in such an everyday way that the ghost is almost believable, and the story is actually scarier than it might have been with a more gruesome approach.

Writer/director Frank LaLoggia's chiller about the dark underbelly of an idyllic small town is so effectively heartfelt yet also creepy that it's surprising he couldn't parlay it into more assignments.

LaLoggia clearly loves his chosen medium: He has a passion for filmmaking-for ferreting out unusual angles, for planning elaborate camera movements, for designing elaborate special effects-that sometimes leads him way over the top. Yet it's the extravagance of his gestures that gives Lady in White its character and imaginative force. [22 Apr 1988, p.A]

LaLoggia directs with creepy effectiveness.

A winning, if uneven, blend of affectionate nostalgia and supernatural scariness.