L'obsession de Sarah Hardy

I enjoyed this movie! I didn't know what to expect. Morgan Fairchild & Sela Ward are always excellent. Polly Bergen is just so very talented. Such wonderful acting! The actors were all well cast. Watching Michael Woods was definitely swoon inducing! He has been in many films with major leading ladies: Diane Lane, Sharon Stone, Jane Seymour, Jaclyn Smith... just to name a few! I believe he has starred in another movie with Morgan Fairchild before. I also remember seeing him on Oprah when he starred on Private Eye with Josh Brolin. A very handsome & talented actor, indeed. I think I should go refresh myself and watch a few more of his films.

I like Morgan Fairchild and Selea Ward but this is a terrible film. The film brings nothing new to the table - it's your basic thing: Rich woman, her husband and his lover - the husband and lover wants to drive her to suicide and take "all that money" (as they say). Nothing new - YAWN!

1/10

Directed by Jerry London and adapted to teleplay by Thomas Baum from the novel, The Crossing, written by Jim Flanagan. It stars Sela Ward, Michael Woods, Roscoe Born, Morgan Fairchild and Polly Bergen.

After a troubled childhood that saw her father die and her mother go mad to the point of suicide, Sarah Hardy (Ward) blossoms into a beautiful woman and marries a handsome man. In spite of her close friends concerns, Sarah and her husband decide to move back to the family home of her childhood, The Pines. It's not long before strange occurrences begin to unnerve Sarah at The Pines. Is her mother not really dead, is it a ghost, or outside influences with ulterior motives?

I genuinely feel bad pouring some scorn on this TV movie, because I so wanted to like it, to grasp a bit of freshness in what has become known as the Gaslight sub-genre of horror. Sadly it's just not very good. It's awash with soap opera operatics, some very poor acting, a confused tonal flow (am I mystery, horror, a message thriller?), an out of place porn movie jazz like musical score, and an ending that beggars belief. The mansion design is great, and there's some nice night time photography during the outer grounds sequences, but it's a difficult film to recommend to those after a good old fashioned mansion based spooker. 5/10

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.

Well, what starts out as a suicide story, which is tragic, and possibly the best part of the movie even though it was a bit sad for me, the rest wasn't all that scary nor interesting, I mean it lacked a lot of frightening scenes and was a bit dated, though the scenes of the dead mother was a little scary, especially the phone call which reminded me of Psycho, but still, the rest of the film was not exciting at all, and the ending itself was empty, it wasn't shocking at all, maybe a bit surprising, but not in a good way, it makes you just pause then say a simple "okaaay", that's it, it's done, zip, nada, nothing, the acting okay, and the lead actress was good. Overall not very good at all.