The Child DVD Review
In The Child, Alicianne Del Mar is hired by a farmer in a remote area as a nanny and house-keeper. On her way to her first day, she drives her car into a ditch and has to walk the last mile. She runs into a neighbor who doesn’t have much good to say about the Alicianne’s new employers. When she finally gets to her destination, she’s met by the old curmudgeon, Mr. Nordon. He lives on the farm with his adult son, Len and his 11 year old daughter Rosalie. After she settles in, she’s alarmed to find out that Rosalie makes regular mid-nightly visits to the nearby cemetery to visit her mother. Soon you find out that Rosalie is actually hanging out with her friends in the cemetery, zombie friends. And she’s using them to get back at all the people that she feels are responsible for her mother’s death.
This movie was a total snooze fest. Everything in it was drawn out needlessly to the point of boredom. You don’t actually see the zombies for the first 65 minutes of the film (it’s only 83 minutes long), they’re just decayed hands from off-screen for most of the movie. At the end, the big zombie chase scene, you see Len trying to beat back a zombie, who’s coming up from the floor, with the butt of a rifle for over a minute. The whole time that Len and Alicianne are chased by zombies, Alicianne just holds her head and screams and cries. It’s really annoying to watch that for the last 20 minutes.
The zombies were horrible looking (not in the good way). They looked as if someone dressed up like creature from the black lagoon, but came out as the mummy. When you first see them on screen, they look kind of scary, but soon you can see them real good and they just look goofy.
Everything about the sound of this movie was awful. First off, all of the dialog is overdubbed like it was originally in another language, but it wasn’t. You can see the actors lips forming the words, but they’re not synced up in the least. The incidental music sounded like random plunkings on pianos and moogs, it would cut in and out with the scenes and sometimes just get chopped off when someone started talking.
The acting was pretty terrible too. Len Nordon was just dead pan the whole time. The other actors just looked awkward. The fact that the dialog was so badly overdubbed didn’t help at all.
The box talked the movie up to be “between Night of the Living Dead and Carrie“. Rosalie was supposed to have all these “psychic powers which she uses to make objects move”. But the only thing in the movie that tells you that is a scene where she is starring at a milk jug and the top pops off.
One funny thing about that movie is that every scene that Mr. Nordon is in, he adjusts his pants by the waistband for the first 30 seconds. Every scene! And he doesn’t seem to be actually moving them at all. He just keeps wrestling with his belt the whole time. It’s rather distracting, but mostly just hilarious.
The Child is not a good movie and you shouldn’t waste you time.
