I recently was watching "Bad News Bears" with Vic Morrow, and realized how much his daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, is now resembling him as she approaches the age he was when he died. So I looked up one of her older movies, just for fun viewing, and found this one on Netflix streaming movies.
It is set and filmed in an area I know well, the areas near swamps in South Louisiana, including a couple of old plantation homes. One of the actors, Ben Mouton, is even from Lafayette and attended USL, the same college I attended a few years earlier.
The two Bonnard sisters live in an operate a B&B in the old plantation home. There has always been rumors that ghosts live in the swamps and people have disappeared with no trace.
The older sister, probably early 30s, is Judith Ivey as the overprotective Charlotte Bonnard. Jennifer Jason Leigh is her sister, perhaps 10 years younger, Lucy Bonnard. Lucy has apparently had some emotional issues growing up and is still on medication. Charlotte treats her more as a child than a sister.
One day a stranger, Eric Stoltz as Washington businessman Matt Rutledge, shows up for his reservation to stay there a few days. It isn't clear what he is doing there, and seems more than a bit suspicious, especially when he begins to make moves towards Lucy.
This doesn't sit well, especially in the eyes of family friend and handyman, Benjamin Mouton as Etienne LeViolette. (As an aside, being from Lafayette, he is the only character that sounds like he is actually from Louisiana, all the other accents are generic "southern" accents that seem out of place.)
A few strange things happen, the pet family dog turns up dead, before the mystery is sorted out.
This is an uneven movie at best, even though the core story has a lot of possibilities. The script, the acting and the direction are mostly bland, often ringing untrue, but Stoltz and Leigh do fine in their roles. I enjoyed it mainly for the novelty of a movie set in my home area, Southern Louisiana.
SPOILERS: When Charlotte was in high school her date was too aggressive and tried to force himself onto her. When little sister Lucy witnessed what was going on she found a rock and hit the guy on the head, who then tried to rape Lucy. But Charlotte picked up a knife, stabbing him to death. Afraid the two girls dragged the body to the edge of the swamp and dumped him in, never to be found. A boy witnessed it, in the nighttime shadows they thought it was their friend Etienne, but it in fact was the guy's brother, now returning for revenge as Matt Rutledge.
