MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Lisa’ a Slasher Epic With a Sitcom Sheen

Which is better: bad movies that are up-front about their crumminess, or bad movies that try to cover up the sleaze with silks and polish?

“Lisa” (citywide) is a piece of pre-digested pathology. It’s a psycho-thriller about a 14-year-old girl who carries on an anonymous phone flirtation with a crazed serial sex killer, a maniac who eventually gets her address and tries to murder her mother. Forget the standard absurdities that fuel this story; underneath it’s a pretty rank, gamy fantasy. It flirts with pedophilia, sadism, maybe even necrophilia.

Yet, the director, Gary Sherman, and his highly gifted cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy, drown the movie in TV-commercial swank, creamy colors and coy sitcom jabber. The script has been shaped to exclude most of the blood and guts, the slasher arias, until the last scenes.

The movie plays up the pubescent cuteness of the central character, pretty-pure demure-brunette Lisa (Staci Keanan) and her giggly little chum, Wendy (Tanya Fenmore), who has frizzy black hair and a smile wider than Annette Funicello’s. In the central scenes, Lisa and Wendy--like the madcap teens in the old Peter Sellers comedy, “The World of Henry Orient,” tail this killer around Los Angeles. Later, Lisa carries on a husky, honey-voiced phone seduction. The killer listens like a coiled cat, predatory, ready to pounce.

This killer, Richard (D. W. Moffett), is an oddball concept, a charming, male-mannikin Angeleno restaurant manager, who carries on candlelight seductions of his victims as he throttles them. Newspapers call him “The Candlelight Killer.” He lives in a bare room, awash in blue light, works out, and when he kills, he first establishes himself with a message on the answering machine--”I’m in the room and I’m going to kill you”--before popping out of the woodwork. In a way, Richard is an L.A. joke, a restaurant joke, an answering-machine joke. A joke is what he remains.

“Lisa” is a modern fear-of-sex thriller--in the “Fatal Attraction,” “Blue Velvet,” “Jagged Edge” mold--and it’s plain that it was made by people who are aware of all the complaints about slasher movies: that they’re anti-female, exploitative, drenched in cadenzas of perverse violence. Perhaps because of this, Sherman plays up a quasi-feminist angle. His heroines, mother Katherine (Cheryl Ladd) and daughter Lisa, live alone, without male protectors. They have to face this ravaging seducer-slayer by themselves--with only Mace and cliches to defend them. They have a chummy, open relationship--and at one strange point, there’s a scene where Lisa seems to be dangling her mother in front of the killer, deliberately tantalizing him.

Katherine is an unwed mother keeping Lisa from boys because she’s afraid she’ll suffer the same fate. That makes “Lisa” a cautionary tale of sorts. It suggests that post-Baby Boom mothers, who went through the orgiastic ‘70s, shouldn’t repress their kids because they’ll wind up carrying on phone flirtations with serial killers. The movie toys with some provocative ideas and then muffles them. Impish Wendy is the dark force that tempts Lisa to sexual revolt, then she lectures her to quit. Lisa is demure and repressed, then she swears like a spoiled-rotten brat.

“Lisa” left me feeling queasy and cheated--mostly because of the dialogue, which is the usual bright, empty TV chitchat, vacuous and thinly programmed with giggles and zingers and everyday blah--but also because I had the feeling that, if the subject were done properly, it would be offensive, should be offensive, and that to try to clean it up like this made it even more so.

Sherman, who co-wrote this script with Karen Clark, may be a director who shouldn’t write, or even co-write, his own scripts. He has interesting visual ideas--like the “behind-the-mirror” underworld he and the effects people and Nepomniaschy conjured up in “Poltergeist 3”--but his plots are polyethylene, his characters are dull chrome and his ear for dialogue is glued to his TV set. “Lisa” (rated PG-13, despite violence, sex and language) isn’t ineffective. It’s shaped in the usual sadistic way that leaves some audiences howling with blood-lust by the climax. But it’s basically a nasty movie that tries to end up nicey-nice: a house-cat of a sex-thriller that wants to claw the hell out of you and then curl up to warm milk and velvety hugs.

‘LISA’

A United Artists presentation of a Frank Yablans production. Producer Frank Yablans. Director Gary Sherman. Script Sherman, Karen Clark. Camera Alex Nepomniaschy. Music Joe Renzetti. Production design Patricia Van Ryker. With Staci Keanan, Cheryl Ladd, D. W. Moffett, Tanya Fenmore, Jeffrey Tambor.

Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).