Customer Reviews

The Child

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you were a regular at the drive-in in the mid 1960s and throughout the 1970s, you probably weren't a stranger to the films released by Harry Novak through his Box Office International film group, enjoying such wonderfully sleazy exploitation fare as Venus in Furs (1967), Miniskirt Love (1967), The Dirty Mind of Young Sally (1970), and Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman (1975), to name just a few. Another Box Office International release was this independent film, titled simply The Child (1977), also known as Kill and Go Hide. Written by Ralph Lucas (Planet of Dinosaurs) and directed by Robert Voskanian (his first, and last film, to date), the movie features Laurel Barnett (Goodbye, Norma Jean) and Rosalie Cole in her only film appearance. Also appearing is Frank Janson, Richard Hanners, Ruth Ballan, and Slosson Bing Jong (no, I didn't make that name up) in the pivotal role as...the gardener.

The film opens on a dark and foggy night, where we see a girl visiting a cemetery...she's got a basket with a kitty, and it's feeding time at the graveyard (lovely)...next we cut to the daytime, and we see a young woman named Alicianne Del Mar (Barnett) driving down a lonely, country road. Some car trouble forces her to hoof it through some fields, and she meets up with Mrs.Whitfield (Ballan). Turns out Alicianne has been hired by the Nordon family, neighbors of Mrs. Whitfield, to look after Rosalie (Cole), the youngest child and the same girl we saw at the outset of the movie. Alicianne trudges to the Nordon's (who happen to live next to a cemetery), and we get to meet the clan, including the curmudgeonly father Joshua (Janson), the older son Len (Hanners), and finally little Rosalie. As Alicianne settles in, she becomes more and more aware of Rosalie's weirdness, particularly her fondness of going the cemetery at night, supposedly visiting her mother's gravesite. In reality, Rosalie's got some funky mojo powers that include, but aren't limited to, her to talking to the dead. In return for her friendship, they perform certain tasks for Rosalie, who seems to blame everyone for the death of her mother. At the insistence of Alicianne, Rosalie's father decides it's time to start exerting his parental control, telling Rosalie she's not allowed out at night any more, to which she scoffs at the old man, telling him he'll get his...and he does, along with a few others, in gruesome fashion, as Rosalie's `friends' make the scene. Soon after Alicianne learns some horrible truths about creepy girl, she decides to split, but it ain't that easy, as Rosalie's friends seem numerous, determined, and hungry...

This wasn't a great film, but it did have some modest charms, and was pretty indicative of a lot of the cheapie horror films floating around drive-ins in the 1970s. It's a fairly low rent production with some good locations, but falters quite a bit given the weak story, amateurish direction, often miserable acting, and the fact many of the scenes that were supposed to take place at night were obviously shot during the daytime, probably due to a lack of lighting equipment. I suppose it is important to keep in mind most who appeared in this film weren't really professional actors, as this was their one and only time appearing on screen, so heaping criticisms on them would be sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. Barnett wasn't too bad, but her role was lacking...she spend nearly the entire last twenty minutes or so cowering, screaming, and holding her head as the stuff continually hits the fan. As far as the character of Rosalie, I hardly found her scary...normally when `bad seeds' are presented on screen, it is unsettling as we tend to think of children as being relatively innocent, innocuous little scamps, and not minions of evil, bent on destroying whomever gets in their way. Rosalie did seem a nasty, uppity child, but her main trait was just being really annoying. I suppose that's a form of evil, but not one that frightens the pants off me. Acting all obtuse and cackling at inappropriate times doesn't necessarily evoke malevolent intent. As far as Rosalie's abilities went, it was never really detailed exactly what all she could do, how she could do it, or where she derived said abilities from, as all that's offered is that her now deceased mother was unhinged in some manner. The story is slow going for about the first half hour, but things do pick up, especially in the last twenty minutes or so when the movie really gets its zombie freak on...and the zombies didn't look that bad, given the low budget nature of the film, but the blood sure looked funky...I wonder how many bottles of catsup where employed in this production? The direction is sort of all over the place, as Robert Voskanian uses this opportunity to explore all kinds of `creative' shots including up angled shots, down angled shots, close ups, etc. I think the effort was to try and create tension, something he'd seen work in other movies, but that's difficult to do here when the audience is feeling nausea due to motion sickness. I usually appreciate an offbeat musical score, but whoever was cranking on the Polymoog synthesizer should have toned down cacophony of discordant electronic beeps and screeches. It was spooky at times, but grating more often than not...as I said, the film does pick up the pace considerably in the twenty minutes, and features a suitable, and very satisfying ending. If you're a gorehound, you'll probably disappointed with this feature as there's not a whole lot of zombie violence, as whenever someone is devoured by the undead, it always happens off screen, where then shortly afterwards we the result of the attack as the half eaten victim is shown for effect.

The picture quality on this Something Weird Video DVD release, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), was decent, with some rough spots, indicating whatever element used for the transfer had obviously seen some action. The Dolby Digital audio isn't too bad, but does feature background noise. As far as extras, included is Del Tenney's zombie feature titled I Eat Your Skin (1964), which, as others have mentioned, features a constant `SWV' mark at the bottom right corner as the film plays. Also thrown in is a trailer for The Child, along with those for Axe (1977), Booby Trap (1970), Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974), Kidnapped Coed (1976), The Mad Butcher (1971), The Toy Box (1971), and Toys Are Not for Children (1972), a gallery of horror drive-in exploitation art with horrorama radio-spot rarities, along with two short subjects, the first titled The Outsider (11.43), an instructional film teaching weird kids how to conform with their peers, and the second titled (poorly, I might add) The ABC of Baby Sitting (10:24), another instructional film discussing the booming baby sitting industry, featuring such useful tips like how to avoid being driven home by a drunk parent and proper fridge raiding techniques. All in all, the featured film rates about two stars, but the overall release with the inclusion of the goodies brings it up to three stars.

Cookieman108

If I learned anything from this film it's that zombies sure hate car horns (they do love eyeballs, though), and actor Richard Hanners does not know how to properly use a hammer...dude, if you choke up on it that much, you'll never get any power out of it...by the way, this feature's worth watching if only to check out the scene where the curmudgeonly father relates, taking an unusual amount of joy in the telling, how a while back, a pack of local boy scouts accidentally poisoned themselves with white oleanders while camping in the area...what a whack-a-doo...

The Child is a zombie movie, although not a "great" one. A city-girl returns to the countryside where she grew up to be a nanny for a little girl who has been very awful since her mother died. But as the nanny falls in love with a man working at the house, the girl gets angry. The girl has control of zombies from the nearby cemetary, and she uses them to strike back at everyone around her.
This disk is very good, as well. It contains trailers for many other movies, and it has a "short" movie (which is about 70 minutes, I believe), that also has zombies in it (that movie is older, and there is very little gore, since the zombies are basically used as cheap workers, as in most older zombie movies).
Excluding several scenes, this one is not as graphic as most zombie movies, but still is gory enough that some people may want to avoid it.

In spite of its ultra-low budget, clunky dialogue, and semi-convincing acting, THE CHILD still manages to cultivate a nice atmosphere of constant dread, along w/ some gory set pieces. Besides, how can you go wrong w/ an eeevil kid, a killer scarecrow, AND a mob of undead ghouls? You can't! Snag this one...

The Child (1977) This is an ultra low budget horror flick from distributor Box Office International, run by the amazing Harry Novak. Harry would scope out movies like this and put them on the drive in circuit throughout the 1960's and 1970's. In this rather odd little movie, pretty young Alicianne has been hired as a nanny for a girl named Rosalie. Little Rosalie lives way out in the boonies in an old house with her crabby old dad and much older brother. Alicianne finds Rosalie to be a strange little girl who spends a lot of time in the cemetery down the road. Don't feel too bad for Rosalie, though, because she does have some friends. Friends who hail from that very same cemetery. Soon, everyone who makes Rosalie mad starts to die horrible gory deaths. With no real explanation, it seems Rosalie has some kind of funky control over the dead, willing them to crawl out of their graves and attack those she feels are responsible for the death of her beloved mom, which is pretty much everybody, including the old neighbor lady, the gardener, her dad, her brother, and eventually even the new nanny. I enjoyed this movie's modest charms, though there's seemingly not much to recommend about it. The script is more a series of scenes than a story, and that lack of flow is not helped by director Robert Voskanian who keeps the pace pretty slow for the most part. One scene ends, another begins and there's no feeling or connection between them. The passage of time in the movie is poorly communicated. It's day, it's night, it's day again, but no time seems to have passed. The acting is not very good, and it's not helped by the fact that all of the dialogue on the soundtrack seems to have been dubbed back in later. On the plus side, there is a Halloween scene involving the scariest Jack O'Lantern EVER, the last twenty minutes are pretty zippy, the gore and makeup effects are nicely done considering the money involved, and there's a general air of dread about the movie starting from the early scenes that gave me enough to mark this one on the positive side of the entertainment scorecard. I'm not sure most would agree with me, so approach this one at your own risk. Something Weird's DVD release features several fun extras as well, including another zombie movie, two old film shorts and some wonderful 60's and 70's era radio ads for horror flicks played over a gallery of movie posters for the same kinds of flicks.

I purchased this DVD in order to obtain a relatively clean and sharp copy of I Eat Your Skin. Now, Something Weird has been completely honest in listing this as an "extra" rather than promoting the disc as a "double-feature," because I Eat Your Skin is plagued with a video-produced "SWV" watermark that distractingly appears on the screen during the entire feature.

The print also suffers from damage that eliminates 1-2 minutes of important dialogue, including the intruduction of a character.

Extremely odd little movie about a little brat of a girl who hates her pretty nanny cuz she has the hots for the hired guy.
Little brat gets jealous and because she is psychic, ala CARRIE...she can manipulate things. I'm assuming that she has made the corpses in the cemetery come alive...otherwise she has some mighty wierd friends. At some point this turns into a zombie flick and the little brat dissapeers until the end when she very pitifully and unconvincingly gets axed. The editing in this film is really strange. I liked it anyway.

The Child is an inventive, fun monster movie that seems meant to be seen late-night on TV by kids. There's a naive, dated quality to this gruesome pic that is actually quite endearing. The low-budget constraints do show at times, but there is a great electronic score, good gore and some fun camp acting.
Sure, it's a tad slow and brooding, but builds up nicely to the exciting climax. Obviously, it's not a film for everyone, but for those who enjoy 70s horror about witches, monsters and spooks... The Child is a perfect Halloween creature feature.

Mmk, gonna be upfront and honest here. The acting is really piss poor and the blood looks like hooker red nailpolish. In other words, it's a deffie B movie. However, I'm a big fan of B movies - so this works for me.

If you're looking for something scary or really realisticly gory, look elsewhere. But if you like the old you-can-see-the-monster's-zipper kind of low budget movies, then this is a gem and worth picking up.

The Child (Robert Voskanian, 1977)

While IMDB does not list this as a made-for-TV movie, I find it hard to believe that anyone ever took this monstrosity seriously enough to release it theatrically, especially in what I can only call its emasculated state. And yet that seems to be the case. Schlock producer Harry Novak signed on a cast of first-(and last-)timers and a handful of people who had minimal-at-best experience in TV character acting, got a crew with almost no experience, picked up some short ends (for real!), and made a movie. This time, the man behind such classics as The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and Rattlers! gives us a creepy young lady named Rosalie Nordon (Rosalie Cole in her only screen appearance) and her brand-new governess, Alicianne (Goodbye, Norma Jean's Laurel Barnett), who finds out before she even gets to the old Nordon place that something is very, very wrong with the Nordon house. After all, no one but family ever visits there, we've been told in one of those well-used conventions of bad horror films. Once Alicianne actually gets to the house, she finds not only Rosalie, but her handsome older brother Len (Richard Hanners, another first-and-last-timer). It's not long before Alicianne realizes there might be more to the locals' suspicions than idle rumor.

The combination of no-budget special effects, lack of acting ability, and pedestrian direction reminds me of about fifty Fulci knockoffs I've seen over the years (the makeup, especially, has echoes of Fulci, though The Child appeared three years before Zombi 2), but it's nowhere near as accomplished as even the least of Fulci's efforts. It's so predictable that even its predictability is predictable. Its scares are not scary. Its plot twists are not twisty. Its acting is not acty. Or something like that. In any case, it's bad, bad, bad. *

The main problem I have with exploitation films is that so many of them neglect to exploit. "The Child" ranks right up (or down) there with "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" as a supposed zombie flick where the zombies obviously missed their wake-up call. The film starts out well as little Rosalee enters a cemetery with a Red-Riding-Hoodesque basket on her arm. She kneels before a headstone, reaches inside the basket and produces a darling little kitten. She then nonchalantly hands the mewling kittie over to a gray rotting hand that emerges from the other side of the grave marker. Fortunately, we don't see the kittie get chomped on. Unfortunately, this is the last we'll see of the zombies until the final reel of this dog. Though not too poorly made, this is still one long, dull slog of a feature. As usual, however, SWV's extras are another story entirely. "The ABC's of Babysitting" is a particular high-point in that it advises all young female would-be entrepreneurs to phone the cops at the slightest (and I do mean SLIGHTEST) provocation. Smell smoke? Call the cops! Hear a funny noise? Phone the fuzz! Got a splinter? Make contact wit da man! These boys in blue look like they're about ready to go Inglewood on the babysitter by the end of this short. Funny, funny stuff!