LOST SOULS (1998) So, so weak Lost Souls - apparently originally called Nightworld: Lost Souls - is a TV movie to its anemic core. Rarely (if ever) before have I beheld a ghost story of such papery blandness. Every "PG" ghost story cliché in the book is thrown in here, right down to the music box. Always, with the music box. John Savage stars as a tech writer (oo! Glamorous!) to moves his family into a country estate and discovers a long-lost Thomas Edison invention which might be useful in contacting The Other Side. Next thing you know, his autistic daughter (movies like this always find a way to work in an autistic kid) is playing with the machine and solving eight-year-old murder mysteries. The other kid asks - nay, begs - for a new murder mystery to be solved. He's got three strikes against him - one, he whines throughout the movie. Two, his name is Jesse. Three - backwards red baseball cap. Director Jeff Wollnough tries to make this as spooky as the TV constraints will let him, so he gives us things like the False Scare By Mirror and False Scare By Prank. Beyond a few references to murders and a late-in-the-film scuffle, there isn't anything here that would get this movie anything beyond a very light PG. Eight-year-old newspapers are sterling white, Savage hides from two people in a position from which he's hidden from us but would have been plainly visible to the people he's supposed to be hiding from, and both parents have their lapses in judgement, letting their kid go off unsupervised when they know there's a child murderer loose in town, or better yet, letting their kid go off supervised by the neighbor they just met. A peripheral, retarded character is introduced so that the script can spend much of its length playing blame-the-retarded-guy, but I am not fooled; movies like this always place a lot of faith in the good-heartedness of the mentally handicapped as well as the infallible intuition of autistic children. It even manages to (briefly) work a psychic link into the ghost angle - which doesn't jibe at all with the ending, which is completely arbitrary and wraps things up very tightly with the killer accidentally falling, hitting his head, and dying, thus saving the other characters the trouble. Absolutely horrible. This is reportedly close enough in plot to Orson Scott Card's book The Lost Boys to warrant a lawsuit - never read it, and now I never want to. Somebody at the IMDb called this a "McMovie". How terribly unfair to McDonald's. BACK TO THE L's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE