Fantôme d'amour

My review was written in June 1990 after watching the film on Academy video cassette.

Sketchy scripting sinks "The Forgotten One", an initially promising erotic ghost story with a decent cast. Film went the direct-to-video route.

Terry O'Quinn is a most unlikely choice to portray a guy who's irresistible to women but plays it straight. He moves from Kansas City to a lonely house in Colorado to get some privacy while writing. A beautiful ghost (Blair Parker) starts bugging him and things get out of hand when his new girlfriend (Kirsty McNichol) also sees the ghost.

O'Quinn, after his "Stepfather" films, has this role down pat, and McNichol is a welcome sight as his down-to-earth pal. Elizabeth Brooks, who got a sexy showcase a decade earlier in Joe Dante's "The Howling", is wasted as a night club singer.

Writer Terry O'Quinn moves into a house haunted by the spirit of a beautiful woman; with help from brash neighbor Kristy McNichol, he gets to the bottom of the mystery. Straight-to-tape item is a stylish low-budget effort aimed at thinking adults. There are erotic undercurrents that are not explored (curious, since the apparition is mostly seen nude), and relationships that seem half-baked, but O'Quinn is excellent here (with no "Stepfather" overtones). It's also a chance to see McNichol do good work before her youthful retirement. Not especially memorable or thrilling, but patient viewers will find some subtle surprises. **1/2 from ****

I had never heard of this film, and didn't think this would be too great. But this movie was pretty damn good. Who knew? I am a little biased, because I really like Terry O'Quinn (from those good old "Stepfather" movies). But I'm also biased in the other direction, since I really dislike Kristy McNichol. In this film, a recently-widowed writer moves into a house in Denver, only to find it haunted by a blood-curdlingly scary (at first) ghost. When he collects enough courage to investigate, he finds that the ghost is actually a blood-warmingly hot woman, who died in the house. His neighbour (McNichol), first believes him crazy, then tries to save him as he falls in love with the occasionally bare-naked and occasionally homicidal ghost. The first half was very scary, and by the end, it actually got pretty sweet. In the end, I was very glad I watched it, and a pleasant surprise is the best surprise of all.

Terry O'Quinn plays author Bob Anderson, who rents an old house where he plans to start writing his next novel. Unfortunately, the place isn't as peaceful as he had hoped: it's home to the ghost of a young woman, Evelyn (Blair Parker), whose creepy presence makes Bob understandably unnerved. Bob eventually plucks up courage to confront the ghost, who leads him to discover her body walled up in the basement, obviously a victim of foul play.

So he goes to the police, right? Well, no, instead he shows his discovery to his neighbour Barbara (Kristy McNichol), with whom he has developed a friendship, and the pair decide to bury the body in a forest. And that's where the film lost me, their decision to inter the corpse in the middle of nowhere instead of alerting the authorities making no sense whatsoever.

It's a shame, because up until that point, the film was working wonderfully: it was atmospheric and spooky, with great performances from the two leads.

Anyway, having been buried, the no longer tormented Evelyn returns to the house to seduce Bob, believing that he is her lover William. A spot of supernatural romance ensues, Bob entranced by the beautiful ghost, but he isn't so happy when he realises that Evelyn intends to kill him so that they can be together forever. This part of the film isn't too bad, except for the scene where Evelyn's ghost drives a car: she died in 1891 so it's more than a little daft.

Overall, I had a reasonable time with The Forgotten One - I just wish that writer/director Phillip Badger had found a way to avoid the issues that I have mentioned.

5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.

The original story line was of a writer who moved into this supposed haunted house in hopes of sparking an idea for a new novel. He is haunted in his dreams by the ghost of a young girl who lures him into the cellar. Over a period of about a month and creative investigation on the houses history, he discovers that a young girl, who was 15 years old at the turn of the century, became pregnant by her boyfriend. The father was so ashamed and so enraged by his daughters behavior, that he walled her up alive down in the cellar. Nearly a hundred years goes by before her story is learned by our writer. He opens up the wall in the cellar and finds a cavity that has been exposed to the elements. The odd noises he heard during the previous month seems to have been coming from this cavity. He decides its all in his imagination, and that it could make a good book. What he doesn't see is that there is another room off to the side of the cavity that contains a skeleton of a young girl. This movie was based on a short story entitled "The Hidden Truth". And was written by yours truly in 1987.