Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 11, 2000, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
That sighing sound you hear during Bless the Child is not the de rigueur choral music (though there’s plenty of that, albeit well-done by Christopher Young), but the muffled creaking of all the genre conventions present in the story. Coming a year after The Sixth Sense reinvented the supernaturally-gifted-child subgenre, Chuck Russell’s screen adaptation of Cathy Cash Spellman’s novel, if anything, marks a regression of the form. It’s not the worst thriller to come out this summer (that would be The In Crowd, and let me take this opportunity to blast that incoherent, poorly shot mess), just a sadly derivative one.
Much has been made of the film’s similarities to The Omen—and they are certainly there—but the plot also has a great deal in common with this year’s terrific Spanish chiller The Nameless (also based on a popular book, by Ramsey Campbell). Both movies center on single mothers trying to save young female relatives from cults that would pervert the children toward evil, and like The Nameless, Bless the Child adopts a realistic dramatic approach—at least for a while. The deeper its protagonist, Maggie O’Connor (Kim Basinger), becomes embroiled with the cult, the more explicit the occult elements become—and the less convincing the movie is. By the time a CGI demon made its brief appearance during the climax, my screening buddy just chuckled and commented that she had defeated something similar the day before while playing Diablo II.
For her part, Basinger plays her first major scene as if it’s the climax of a Lifetime TV movie, but soon calms down and gives a fairly compelling performance as Maggie tries to save her little niece Cody (Holliston Coleman) from the clutches of Eric Stark (Dark City’s Rufus Sewell—what’s up with his eyes in this movie?). He’s the leader of a New Age cult that has based its teachings on Satanism, and is targeting children born on a certain date who might represent a spiritual challenge to his growing power. We know, of course, that Cody (whose mom abandoned her to Maggie following her birth and has now married Stark) is just the girl he’s after, since she’s got a persuasively beatific demeanor and can bring dead birds back to life. When Stark abducts the child, Maggie teams up with FBI agent Travis (Jimmy Smits) to recover Cody and bring Stark down.
Nothing that follows is difficult to predict, and the script by Tom Rickman and Clifford and Ellen Green (the latter two also wrote The Seventh Sign—not a good sign, that) behaves as if there haven’t been dozens of urban satanic chillers in the three decades since The Exorcist. Clichés abound, from the scary, witchlike caretaker in Stark’s employ (Dimitra Arlys) to the elderly priest with all the answers (Ian Holm, taking over from Rod Steiger in End of Days) to Christina Ricci wearing all black.
Ricci's character does figure in a nifty visual shock, and Russell works up a few good setpieces, particularly one in which Maggie finds herself in a car driving the wrong way on a Manhattan bridge. But his serious approach isn’t backed up by the screenplay, which turns on increasingly ridiculous situations and dialogue. Not to mention unanswered questions—if Cody is the paranormally gifted one, why is it the “normal” Maggie who has the computer-generated visions of flying demons and swarming rats?
