SHADOW HOUSE

When her photographer sister, Annie, is killed in a fall from the trellis of Colorado's Owen mansion, where she'd returned, against police orders, to get spooky pictures for a magazine assignment, Nora Honeycut vows, ``I'm going to find out what happened.... No matter what it takes.'' What it takes is a fine disregard for official indifference and threats, and a plan with Annie's beau, Thomas Whitney, to get past the keepers of the mansion—doddering old Chastity Owen and her caretaker—to find out just what misshapen horror (whom local cover-up conspirators from police chief Roy Fellows to heavy-drinking Dr. Everett Newby know as ``Willy'') is living on baby food in the windowless cupola. What in the world could Willy have to do with the Owen mansion's history of homicide (Chastity's grandfather killed his wife; her mother killed her father when he molested Chastity; and five years ago high schooler Bonnie Connor was raped and murdered on the Owen grounds)? By far the wildest of Allegretto's trying neo-gothics (The Suitor, 1992, etc.), with laughably hollow thrills and chills and a penny-dreadful hobgoblin. Free Willy.