L'ossessione di Sarah Hardy

Initially interesting movie with a plot that held promise. Sela Ward's performance was better than what audiences have come to expect in television movies. The build up of suspense started with increasing expectancy. I felt that the ending was anti-climatic and sputtered into confusion. I give 3 stars out of 10.

I love Sela Ward, so I watched this movie when it aired on TV last night, and at first it seemed like a campy thriller. It quickly turns into a "Lifetime Original Movie." I thought Sela's acting was terrible, which surprised me. Morgan Fairchild is pretty enough but can't hold a candle to Sela, and the man playing the husband (who I didn't recognize from anything before or since 1989) doesn't help the movie at all. I think it would have been saved by better writing in the latter half and better direction. It starts promisingly and goes downhill fast. It's dated, boring, predictable and the ending itself made me wish I hadn't even wasted two hours. Save yourself and skip this one.. It's too late for me.

The movie starts with the funeral of Sarah's father. Sarah's mother is being cruel to the girl. Later, Sarah's mother goes from cruel to insane. Miss Stepford, who takes care of the house, provides the poor girl some comfort.

15 years later, Sarah is marrying Austin at a little church next to the cemetery where her mother's gravestone is. The mother's body was never found. Lucy, Sarah's best friend as a child, is a soap actress whose role is being discontinued. Allen, a shrink who was also a friend, is not happy.

Sarah moves back into the mansion known as The Pines, on the Oregon coast, where she has not lived since her mother ran into the ocean and never came back. She seems happy with her new life until she starts hearing her mother's voice again. Then the harpsichord her mother used to play ... only no one is there. Then things really start to get weird.

Sela Ward has a reputation as a quality actress, and I saw potential here, though I wouldn't have said she was that good just from seeing this movie. Morgan Fairchild was better than I expected, and Polly Bergen was fine as Miss Stepford.

This wasn't a horror movie in the classic sense, but more of a mystery with some interesting plot twists, including some that I didn't see coming. As the movie progressed, I liked it better than I thought I would.

This is a TV movie thriller masquerading as a ghost story, and it's as dim as it sounds. It encapsulates everything terrible about the American TV movie genre of the 1990s (although it narrowly missed that decade by a year): horrible scripting, a lack of decent characters, routine acting, and a storyline that thinks its something special when in actual fact it isn't.

THE HAUNTING OF SARAH HARDY attempts to build a decent Gothic atmosphere along the line of Du Maurier's REBECCA but attempts at building suspense are destined for failure. Instead, this becomes a piece of strictly routine hokum, with characters supposedly sent out of their wits by mysterious hauntings and spooky goings-on. The main issue I had was with the predictability of the storyline, which meant I knew exactly what was going on and guessed the twist well in advance. That makes for a very boring viewing experience.

There are no actors of note in the production, just the kind of faces that appear in this particular genre and never anything else. The lead, Sela Ward, would go on to appear in the horror remake of THE STEPFATHER some 20 years later, seemingly not having aged in the meantime, but given her lacklustre acting on show here you wonder how she ever had a career in the first place.

I remember this as one of the first great mystery films that I saw as a child. My parents only let me watch it because Alan's office and Ms. Stepford's kitchen were both located in my family home in Oregon. We still tell the tale of Sela Ward volunteering to babysit my baby brother while Mom drove the three of us girls to elementary school.

Not until I saw The Others have I seen a movie that makes me second-guess myself so much. I love Sela's acting, even if the writing would not have impressed me as an adult.

It also reminds me of What Lies Beneath, the conspiracy of one character who may not believe in supernatural influences preying on the credulous for their own gains.