Chief among the film's many pleasures is its marvelous team of actors, for however jarring an occasional visual or logic flaw might first seem, one need only wait a heartbeat before LaLoggia's gifted cast tugs one right back into the movie's magic all over again. Child actor Lukas Haas merits particular acclaim as Frankie, turning in a performance so winning and so forthright that one instantly sees in him an actor whose sheer earnestness puts the average mugging, hipster child star from TV and film to shame. Clearly, Haas' much-heralded breakthrough work at age six in 1985's Witness was no fluke; this lad is a natural actor. Likewise, veteran actor Alex Rocco, whose closest brush with fame came as smarmy Hollywood agent Al Floss in the one-season CBS satire The Fabulous Teddy Z, could hardly be better, creating in Angelo a figure so wise and warm that, could his integrity and love be bottled and sold to real-life fathers, teenage actor Len Cariou, whose family friend-gone-mad Phil is by turns caring and crazed, sympathetic and sinister. True, it is all too easy to recognize Phil as the Cliffside Killer, yet in the hands of a lesser actor, Phil might have been nothing but an eye-rolling, hand-wringing freak. Amazingly, though, Cariou makes Phil seem all the more deadly because outwardly he appears so respectable, so kind; since he has in effect "seduced" the entire Scarlotti family for so many years, one can easily see how a young, trusting child like Melissa might fall prey to his charms.