Perfect cast and a good story

One of my all time favorites.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

A classic example of TV horror's penchant for the old bait-and-switch, this un-scary bit of Hollywood nostalgia masquerading as a ghost story shamelessly strings the viewer along by setting the story in the genuinely creepy Harold Lloyd estate, which has enough sinister menace in and of itself to keep us watching until we're so invested we have to sit through it until the end. Marianna Hill plays a silent-era film star who's been pretending to be dead for over thirty years so she can use either witchcraft or drugs (this is never clear) to seduce a screenwriter who's young enough to be her son while trying to bump off the guy's wife. That's the movie in a nutshell, and like a nutshell it needs to be spit out. But that creepy mansion keeps us interested. Kate Jackson helps, too, who puts in the only good performance, but neither Harold Lloyd's house nor Kate can save a turkey that manages to waste even the talents of Bill Macy. Three stars for the house, one star for Kate. The rest is a waste of time.

A biographer and his wife move into the old Hollywood mansion of 1930s movie star Lorna Love, who died at a young age and whose body lies in state on the property--embalmed and behind glass. The couple is writing a book on Lorna and want to be close to her spirit, but get more than they bargained for (surely other books about such a world famous star had been written before, but the movie doesn't take details like that into consideration). The agenda here is to have the writer, whose own father once had a torrid affair with Lorna, become hypnotized by the girl's portrait and turn against his wife, all while someone dressed in black is lurking around causing trouble. Tacky TV-movie from the prolific producing team of Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, here working with a fifth-rate script, a cheap rehash of 1968's "The Legend of Lylah Clare" (itself a mishmash of movie memories). Kate Jackson runs from room to room in the mansion calling out for husband Robert Wagner, who isn't doing any writing; Sylvia Sidney is the faithful housekeeper, still on staff in the empty house; and Joan Blondell is a friend from the old days who hints that Lorna and she were involved in witchcraft. The sepia-toned flashbacks are well done, though Marianna Hill is all wrong as Lorna Love (she's too modern), and James Barnett's teleplay is full of dead ends and deadly talk. A twist at the finish line brings up more questions than Barnett or director E.W. Swackhamer could ever hope to answer, while Wagner's book (a MacGuffin, as it turns out) appears to be permanently shelved.

Cheezy but kinda fun, this low-budget TV movie is set mostly in and around a 36-room Hollywood mansion, dark and sinister, wherein long ago lived a silent movie goddess named Lorna Love, but who now is entombed in a glass "shrine" on the mansion's grounds. Into this creepy world comes husband and wife writers researching Lorna Love for a book. The plot is simple and straightforward, but very campy. Subtle clues in the dialogue and visuals point to the twist at the end.Color cinematography is terrible. The images, grainy to begin with, seem blurred or out of focus, which conveys the impression that the producers used cheap film stock. Or maybe the transfer to DVD made the visuals look bad. Sound quality is even worse. For insertion of TV commercials, each plot sequence fades to black, which makes the plot choppy. And background music is your typical nondescript, off-the-shelf elevator music.Probably the best element is the casting of several older actresses including animated Joan Blondell, and wonderful Sylvia Sidney, whose gruff voice and thick red lipstick give her a unique, one-of-a-kind image. As husband and wife, Robert Wagner and Kate Jackson have minimal chemistry together. Jackson tries hard, maybe a little too hard. Wagner seems bored.This film looks and feels very 1970s. The story's underlying premise isn't bad at all. Indeed, pick any fairly young deceased Hollywood celebrity. With major changes in the film's plot, geared to realism, might we envision the film's premise about Lorna Love being applied to that deceased person?

Aaron Spelling attempted to dabble in horror with this flick, concerning two married journalists doing research on a long-dead Hollywood star. Lorna Love was the top star of her time, and it seems that she employed more than charm and talent to get to the top, namely, witchcraft, and seems to be employing it from beyond the grave on the husband(Robert Wagner), who is the son of Lorna's former love. Will Lorna prevail? Or will the wife(Kate Jackson)save her husband? It's a surprise. It's a decent film, but if Dan Curtis HAD been doing this, it might have been much, much better.