MILO
You might ask, "Why-lo?"

  Milo offers up a creepy opening, a disturbing conclusion, and perilously close to nothing at all worthwhile in between, where it becomes a low(er) rent I Know What You Did Last Summer with a midget villain.

Jennifer Jostyn stars (in an awful performance) as Claire, a substitute high-school teacher who's terminally unsatisfied with, well, everything.  Then she gets a notice from her childhood friend that she's getting married, so she flies off to the small town where she grew up...only to find that said friend had died while she was en route.  Oh yeah, and both of them were in the same five-some of little girls who, long ago, were tricked by a psychotic boy named Milo into playing a game of "doctor" with him, in which one of the girls was killed.  Two down...

The opening (in dream-flashback) is creepy as hell, and even the scenes of Claire trying to assert her authority in her new class (she takes over her friend's class) hold a certain quiet dread, with kids being on the other side of some unstated, spooky fence from adults.  A lot of cheese could've been poured on this, but it wasn't.  For a while.

Then it's about an hour or so of IKWYDLS with this little kid in a rain slicker goin' around making trouble.  Sure, the subplot involving what might be Milo and his relationship with a friendless boy in Claire's class has potential, but it's unfulfilled.  Vincent Schiavelli pops up later as Milo's father, so you know there's something icky there.

Finally, things wrap up nicely in a nasty basement climax, which made me wish the rest of the movie had half the spooks of its opening and its close.  Looks good, anyway.   The closing credits claim that it's based on actual events, or so claims an IMDb comment-guy.  I didn't bother to check.  I find it a little unlikely.

It's not THAT bad overall, but don't bother with this one, when there are so many other far superior killer-kid movies out there like...uh...

Hrm.  This subgenre sucks.

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