"Mothers don't lock up your daughters" might be the message of this satisfying, well-crafted tongue-in-cheek thriller from director Gary Sherman, whose previous films include DEAD AND BURIED; VICE SQUAD; WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE; and POLTERGEIST 3. LISA stars Staci Keanan, the essence of cute
perkiness from the TV sitcom "My Two Dads," as its spunky 14-year-old title character, whose first, tentative adolescent stirrings are being thwarted by her mom, Katherine (Cheryl Ladd). A perhaps uniquely Californian (the film is set in Los Angeles), contradictory mix of laid-back liberalism and
paranoid repression, Katherine insists that Lisa call her by her first name and share everything with her, while allowing Lisa to lead an "independent" life except in one respect: she is not allowed to date until she turns 16. This restriction is prompted by Katherine's own past experience as a
young, unwed mom disowned by her parents and abandoned by Lisa's father. Through a lot of hard work and sacrifice, Katherine has been able both to build a thriving flower business and maintain close ties with her daughter. But her siege mentality concerning men (Katherine herself resists romantic
involvements for fear of subjecting Lisa to emotional trauma) has had some odd effects on her daughter. Left out of the teenage mainstream as a result of her mom's dating prohibition, Lisa has withdrawn into a romantic fantasy world. Not only does she harbor the usual crushes on rock stars, she
also follows strange men, takes photos of them, tracks them down through their car license plates, and then makes enticing phone calls to them. This being California, it isn't too long before Lisa latches onto the wrong guy, namely suave restaurant manager Richard (D.W. Moffett), who, in his spare
time, is the notorious Candlelight Killer. Like Lisa, Richard tracks down his female victims through their license plates and taunts them with insinuating calls (all of which he records for his private collection). Eventually, he sneaks into their apartments and forcibly wines and dines them by
candlelight before killing them (in deference to the film's PG-13 rating, most of the violence takes place off-screen). After Lisa's best friend (Tanya Fenmore) suggests that Mom's own social life could use a little improvement, Lisa tries to set Katherine up with Richard, bringing about the
film's climax.
Though the actors in LISA do effective work, the film's true stars are its answering machines and telephones--all sleek, sexy designer models seen in constant, admiring closeup. And that's as it should be, since LISA does for these devices what SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE did for the camcorder and
VCR. Through Lisa's and (later) Richard's "antics," they are seen from the start as tools of fantasy and sexual gratification. Though intended for communication, they are also instruments of deception, allowing both Lisa and Richard to obtain a sexual power they lack in their real lives, through
the assumption of seductive and dangerous alter egos. Lisa is especially accomplished at this game, affecting a husky, bedroom drawl that transforms her, with disturbing quickness, from a plaid-skirted schoolgirl into a stalker of helpless men. Once Lisa and Richard connect, the film comes alive
as a high-stakes game of tense, telephonic cat-and-mouse. The two characters are clearly differentiated, however, in that Sherman (who cowrote LISA's script with Karen Clark) portrays Lisa's phone games as, at worst, a healthy reaction to the unhealthy repressiveness of her mother, whose own
motivations the film views sympathetically. That Richard uses Lisa's MO to stalk his own victims says more about Richard's murderously arrested emotional development than it does about Lisa's psychological makeup.
Astute viewers will recognize more than a little Hitchcockian influence in LISA's plot and characters. Lisa's relationship with Katherine is a much-softened reworking of Norman Bates' relationship with his "mother" in PSYCHO, while Lisa's relationship with Richard recalls that between Teresa
Wright's character and Joseph Cotten's Merry Widow Murderer in SHADOW OF A DOUBT. But LISA is no mindless run-of-the-mill ripoff. Closer to a true homage, it has a style and wit all its own in the hands of Sherman, who, after a decade of turning out such minor genre gems, continues his career as
one of Hollywood's most underrated directors. (Violence.) leave a comment