I have to say, The Child is a strange movie. It’s also a hackish, clumsy mess of a movie! But it is kind of a fun hackish, clumsy mess of a movie!
It’s a “bad seed” story about an evil little girl who can reanimate the dead, among other things (like pop the top of a milk bottle with her mind bullets!). She hates everyone and blames them for the death of her mother, so she uses her reanimated zombie friends to kill them. The offenders include her really weird father (who might actually be responsible for the mother’s death), the old lady down the street, her brother, her nanny, the gardener… man, who didn’t get in on this killing action? Anyway, that’s really about it. There’s no explanation for anything, just a lot of killing. And some weird, weird dialog that goes nowhere. But mostly killing.
This is one of those movie that were usually on in the background while our parents’ generation was necking at the drive-in during the ’70s. I’m sure it was great for that purpose. To watch? Well, your enjoyment is dependent on your taste for weirdness, bad acting, bizarre direction and zombies that eat kittens. In other words, I liked it pretty well.
Two things stand out — both shot composition and score are random, outlandish and grating. The director or DP sure had some fun putting the camera in weird places and filming long shots of not very much at all! And the score … ye gods. Twisting the knobs of a synthesizer while your cat walks across the keys does not a score make! Please stop.
There really is a scene of the little girl feeding the zombies kittens. It’s right at the beginning. The zombies looked decent, considering the crap nature of the film. And the gore was cool, if really cheap looking. They reused one “face torn off” effect a few times, but hey, it worked! As long as you didn’t look to closely, anyway.
I also learned zombies hate car horns, so now you know, too.
There was no short, because again I was exhausted and barely able to stay awake for the main feature.
