LISA (1990)
The most universal teenage experience is the allure of the prohibited. Be it brightly colored hair, horror movies or heavy metal music, whatever happens to piss your parents off will quickly become the stuff of clandestine trips to friends' houses and secret stashes under the bed. In that specific regard, the title character of 1990's LISA is as relatable as they come. Her strict single mother, Katherine (Cheryl Ladd), won't allow her to date until she turns sixteen. Lisa (My Two Dads' Staci Keanan) passes the two years she has to wait by being absolutely boy crazy.
The combo of parental edict and Catholic school doesn't leave Lisa with much of an outlet for her emerging new interest. With help from her best friend Wendy (Tanya Fenmore) and a breathy babydoll imitation of an adult, she catfishes the DMV info of attractive older men she sees on the street.
The details are used for making giggling crank calls and sneaking Polaroids of her unsuspecting targets. She keeps the photo trophies in a scrapbook, full of heart dotted notes, occasional celebrity crushes, and schoolgirl doodles. It's definitely stalking adjacent, but she's no smoldering POISON IVY-style seducer. Denied the usual routes to puppy love, she makes her inaccessible objects of desire out of ordinary people, keeping them at the safe remove of a telephone line and an instant camera.
Lisa is a somewhat precocious kid, and her ingenuity would be creepy if it wasn't tempered by a generous dose of naiveté. Unfortunately, there’s someone else in town who likes to play much less benign telephone games. Dubbed "The Candlelight Killer", he sets up a Quiet Storm music video-ready scene of wine and candlelight in random women's apartments. Lurking in the shadows, he waits for his victims to listen to an answering machine message announcing his intrusion into their homes, and his intent to kill them. As the killer's face and name are revealed in the pre-credits scene, a lot of the tension stems from both watching Richard's (D.W. Moffett) daytime guise as a handsome and charming restaurant manager, and the inevitability of his chance meeting with the equally telephone obsessed teenager.
An erotic thriller and an after school special might seem like strange bedfellows, but genre great Gary Sherman’s (DEAD & BURIED) direction and script (co-written with Karen Clark) recognize the cautionary tale leanings that lie beneath each narrative thread's DNA. Be it smoky noir or youth scare exploitation flick, both often hinge on how one bad decision can spiral in life changing ways, even if the path to that ruin relies on a lot of highly improbable coincidence.
In retrospect, LISA is a charming relic of the sort of goofy plot points that could only exist in a bygone era of analog tech.
The harried civil servants happily give out personal info at the giggling, breathy drop of a dime. Everyone studiously checks their answering machine as soon as they arrive home. Star 69's last call return isn't in usage. An early electric lock conveniently opens two vehicles JUST in time for Lisa to get herself stuck in Richard's car (one of the film's best sequences). This sort of thing was barely plausible 30 years ago. Watching the film now, it’s outright impossible to even conceive of these details as anything other than a time capsule of a world before constant connectivity.
Yet for all of its gleefully pulpy notions, LISA is surprisingly uninterested in assigning its female leads into easy categories. Katherine is indeed overprotective, but she's never treated like a fallen woman for either her teenage pregnancy or her ‘80s soft suiting career ambitions. Perhaps she's miscalculated the balance between being her daughter's friend and a parent, being a very young mother. There's a still a deep bond there considering all Katherine had to give up to raise the child on her own. As for Lisa, she's not the coolest girl in school, but she's got a supportive best friend in Wendy and has hit enough of the high school social radar that she gets invited on a double date, even if she can't accept it. If there's silly charm in all of the retro trappings, there's genuine warmth in the relationships.
Sure, it all culminates in the expected close quarters showdown between predator and prey that was obvious from the opening few frames. All of the secrets and miscommunications between Katherine and Lisa are also what arguably got them into this mess in the first place. Yet instead of a boyfriend, police officer, or other male authority figure, it's the mother and daughter’s own ability to face the even the absolute worst of the world together that gets them out of it. Well, that and Cheryl Ladd's surprisingly robust swing with a baseball bat, anyway.
These sort of soapy domestic set dramas are often derided as trashy video store filler or Made For TV fluff, but their insanely long cable shelf lives also make them the stuff of nostalgia. In the case of the more gratuitous entries, they might even be someone’s first taste of explicit forbidden fruit, even if only for a millisecond of skin on a scrambled cable box. The days of starter horror sleepovers and hours long conversations about nothing on a landline are long gone for most of us, but LISA is a breezy, better than average reminder of how important they used to be. Everything seems like life and death when you're fourteen, over the top cautionary tale or otherwise.
LISA is available on Blu ray and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Paramount Plus.
