Watch The Child For Free

hyped garbage

How sad is this?

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This is one of those 70s independent horror films like "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" and "Let's Scare Jessica To Death" that are odd, crude, dated, but interesting in their dreamlike approach to the genre. It's not as good as the aforementioned, but it has its points. A very beautiful young woman shows up to be nanny for a bratty young girl living in an isolated farmhouse with her crusty old father and hunky grownup brother. We figure out pretty soon that the brat is a malevolent force around here, though just how she manages to (apparently) raise the dead in order to off anyone who ticks her off is one of many logical details you're better off not pondering. (The movie doesn't bother explaining, anyway.) The plot is very thin, yet the film feels atmospheric and eventful enough. It's not "good" by any standards, but it has personality and its own oddball sense of conviction. The most laughable and incongruous element is a musical score overwhelmed by florid piano arpeggios (I'm not the first person who thought of Liberace), though after a while you can somewhat tune it out. If the movie had a more effectively disturbing score, a la "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," it might now be considered a minor classic-- which would be overrating it, but it's certainly no piece of camp trash, either. (Which is not to say I don't enjoy camp trash at times.) Most of the participants seem to have never made another movie, and "The Child" has that compelling curiosity of a one-shot genre movie made by people whose arty inclinations probably doomed their futures in commercial cinema, but which also make this sole effort more interesting than most of what it would have shared drive-in and grindhouse screens with in the mid/late 70s.

Wow. I dare say you have never seen such a surreal film unless...well, you have seen THIS masterpiece of surreal cinema. I don't believe the movie was shot on earth or that earthlings were involved in the production, it just feels too otherworldly, and that's how I perceived it just after having watched a movie about a Martian society in which Santa Claus actually existed on earth.Reportedly the film is about an evil girl killing adults. Well, you wouldn't really know she was evil because the film goes for GLARING CREEPY FROM START TO FINISH! Apart from the chick that stumbles into this hellhole and that we are supposedly meant to identify with every character here exists to creep out the chick (and consequently the viewer). Animals too, although you rarely get to see any. And woods. They are the evilest of them all. For example take the old lady she encounters in the beginning. Acting overly friendly but always implying certain doom in her dialogue. Well, after "our chick" meets the wicked family she suddenly is one whom the viewer is meant to feel for when she gets killed off. As for the evil girl, the only thing that distinguishes her wickedness from the wickedness of the other characters is that she is one wickedly bad actress.In any other case I'd say the film is "hella stupid" but it creates such a thick atmosphere, mainly with its dense sound design but also with the lively camera-work, that it feels like experiencing a dream and when it becomes more incoherent it just feels even more like a dream. Apparently more effort was put into the sound design than into actually shooting the damn thing - even if the filmmaking here is anything but typical - but the walls of sounds that runs along on the soundtrack, wow. Only one section towards the end of the movie was so dull that even the sound editor simply skipped that part, leaving it untouched, for which I can't blame him, other than that there isn't a quiet second in the film. And did I mention the flick has a piano score? Yeah, MELLOW PIANO! Mixed with a lot of weird sounds.As for the editing, well, that's a big part of what makes this such a surreal film. Coherence is almost non-existent, almost as if the director of photography after he was done shooting took the pile of film stock that was to be used, threw it onto the editor's floor and the editor then took one random piece of film and tucked it onto the next random piece of film until it was all one piece. Adding to the whole affair probably was the fact that the TV rip I watched was dark as all hell. Overall I very much was reminded of Spielberg's 'Something Evil' also because of the camera-work. So this would be like a incoherent, surreal version of that film. One more thing, this turns into a zombie movie at the end and initially that's also very cool. The weirdness of this flick knows no boundaries.

When I say the "bread and butter" of 70s drive-in horror, I mean movies like this one came and went, forgotten and/or never seen by the majority. But it was films like this that kept drive-ins and smaller movie houses in business. I am sothankful for the age of the DVD. With the DVD era, companies such as AnchorBay, Something Weird Video (Image), Blue Underground, Shriek Show, andmany others have brought back lost cult classics (and not so cult classics) so that new generations can discover them, and the older generations canrediscover them. "The Child" has all the right ingredients for a b-horror movie. A little bit of homemade special effect gore, a soundtrack that gives you the creeps, zombies, and it set in the countryside. It may have it's slow parts, but the final 20 minutes or so deliver the goods in fine 70s b-grade fashion. You will be getting startled one minute, then laughing the next (unintentionally of course).

Not great, but not bad, either, The Child is a lot like Dawn of the Dead or Night of the Living Dead set in the late 1930s. The cars and sets look like the era they are set in (the 1930s) but the sitter Aliceanne wears a dress that looks like it is more from the 1890s and both she and the adult son of the farmer have 1970s hair styles - not much consistency in this period drama! The film is also inconsistent in its lighting, as one scene will have daylight, the next scene will be night, then go back to day, etc. While it does have some technical flaws and takes a while to get exciting, it does turn into a good zombie movie in the final twenty minutes. The two heroes (unknown performers who look a lot like a young Susan Dey and Michael Cole from the Mod Squad) have to try to fight off a group of zombies in a remote shack, in the film's exciting climax. The zombies themselves amble along like the creatures in the films of George Romero, but have excellent makeup and look quite demonic. It is not completely like Romero's films, in that zombies are not rampaging throughout all of the setting of 1930s America in this movie, but you do get the same sense of desperation and hopelessness in this production by Harry Novak. The script does plod along and you really never get to know any of the characters well (even Aliceanne acts a bit strange at times), but it is worth a look if you can find it. Reminded me of what would happen if a bunch of zombies attacked the Waltons!