The Child (1977) - I felt the need to rewatch this because it bugged me that not only could I not remember a thing about the content of the movie, I couldn't remember what my opinion of it was - it is not uncommon for me to forget a lot of the contents of a movie these days, but still remember the impression of "good or bad" it left me with.
I can now see how I'm going to struggle to remember this one in a year or two. The plot, a woman is hired to move in with a family and look after a child after the child's mother has passed away. The child has ghoulish friends/pets in the cemetery and a murderous streak. This is revealed in the opening scene and isn't spoiling much of the movie. I generally try to stay away from plot synopsis because it either feels like I'm recounting the plot to someone who has seen the movie or run the risk of spoiling it for other people who might care about such things, and I get self-conscious about where that spoiling cut-off point is. I don't think I will say much else about the plot because of that, and also, the plot in this movie feels pretty flimsy.
I think the summary of my opinion of the film could be, it feels like the rough draft of a good to very good movie. I'm not sure if the second draft would be an improvement though. The strengths of this movie seem to be the sense of atmosphere and scenes it creates (you'll get a good sense of this within the first couple of minutes). You'll get a lot of fog in this movie, and lots of wind in the soundtrack, accompanied with psychotronic noise. However, if I were to apply one other adjective to this movie, it's "stilted." Like, a lot of the movie is 90% there, but you can't help but keep noticing the 10% off. Like, how 100% of this movie is ADRed, so every line of dialogue doesn't have a sense of place, and doesn't quite match what it sounds like it should be coming out of the body in the scene. Not completely wrong, just, about 5-10% off (the lips do mostly sync up, that's not what I'm talking about). Or how you'll have lots of wind in the sound, but they couldn't mix that in with the ADR, so the wind will drop in the beginning as it briefly switches to a line of dialogue (this becomes less prevalent as the movie progresses). And the dialogue often feels like there's just some type of transitionary sentence missing. Like they realized there were ideas they wanted to express to get through to set up the scene or the idea of foreshadowing, but they didn't quite know how to express it. But it's also just close enough, that you can almost imagine the dialogue fitting together, just... not quite. Which then also lends itself to the plot feeling like an excuse for a sequence of scenes where there were images they wanted to capture.
All of that said, this is still a general recommend. They felt like they were trying to capture an ethereal, haunted graveyard tone, and they did it in abundance (maybe, over-abundance). There's also a scene with a jack-o-lantern that demonstrates the film makers could visually imagine and produce haunting images, which just further makes me suspect they had a high concept of visuals of what they wanted, but not really the details of the whys. I think if you channel surfed across it at 1 am, you'd be pretty happy with this weird, little, movie that's putting you off-kilter. You'd just keep perpetually be thinking you were missing something, like there should be more plot there and you're just not picking up on it (but in reality, it's just not there). (also, "other kids"? there's other kids in this movie? where do they live? are there other houses? are they close to the graveyard? I don't think we're supposed to think about this).
The gore does does seem to clash with the movie, visually reminding me of all things, Humanoids from the Deep. It's not bad, but feels like it should be in a different movie. The ghoul costumes seemed fairly good; maybe that's just the vibe this movie had no budget.
And I think the only great scene environment sin of the movie was, the final chase was clearly shot during daylight hours when it both felt like it should have been taking place at night, only to be confirmed in the dialogue where a character, hiding in a shack says, "it'll be day soon," as the rays of the sun are clearly shining through wooden boards (I think it's safe to say they were going for Night of the Living Dead with that finale).
I normally don't like writing lengthier reviews, but the weird mixed bag of quality on this one is going to be hard for me to remember what it's like if I don't write it down somewhere.
ETA: Ah. I think my mind has put together one of the big flaws as to why it's hard to remember this movie.
That flimsiness of plot and general lack of cohesion, plus going full on atmospherics from the get-go, basically prevents the movie from building up a sense of tension as it progresses, or even a sense of progression of plot. It's more of a sequence of potentially (depending on viewer and frame of mind of the viewer) interesting scenes.
Last edited by Little Ash; 05-24-22 at 11:11 PM.
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