In early 20th century California, a young woman, Alicianne, takes a job as a nanny to a young girl, Rosalie Nordon, whose mother has recently died. On her way to the rural, secluded Nordon home, Alicianne meets a neighbor who warns her of the family's reputation. She soon meets the crabby, morbid Mr. Nordon, his awkward son Len, and the aloof Rosalie, who can seemingly animate objects when she is angry.
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There were a lot of truly great horror movies produced in the seventies - but this film certainly isn't one of them! It's a shame The Child isn't better as it works from a decent idea that takes in a couple of sometimes successful horror themes. We have the idea of a vengeful child, which worked so well in classic films such as The Bad Seed and then we have the central zombie theme, which of course has been the backbone of many a successful horror movie. The plot is basically this: young girl blames a load of people for the death of her mother, so she goes to the graveyard and raises the dead to get revenge (as you do). This is all well and good, except for the fact that it's boring! Nothing happens for most of the film, and although it does pick up at the end with some nice gore; it's not enough of a finale to justify sitting through the rest of it. The film was obviously shot on a budget as the locations look cheap and all the actors are rubbish. There's really not much I can say about the film overall as there isn't much to it. The Child is a dismal seventies horror flick and I certainly don't recommend it.
Alicianne (Laurel Barnett) becomes a live in babysitter for young Rosalie Nordon (Rosalione Cole) who has recently lost her mother. But Rosalie misses her dead mother a lot and continuously visits her grave (conveniently located in a cemetery right behind the house) late at night...where she also meets her "friends"...This starts off good with a truly eerie sequence in the cemetery...then falls apart. The story is thin and there is TONS of padding to make the film 85 minutes long. The acting is terrible across the board (with Cole easily being the worst). Badly directed with some of the WORST editing I've ever seen in a motion picture. Scenes (and sound) are just cut off with no rhyme or reason. Also the film has terrible (and obvious) post-production sound.As for blood and violence--forget it! There's very little and what there is looks incredibly fake. I've NEVER seen such fake-looking blood--looks like ketchup! Boring, pointless--a rightfully forgotten drive-in movie. You can skip this one.
A pretty lady is hired as the nanny of a spooky little girl called Rosalie. The girl is a bit of a loner, mostly hanging out in the woods that surround her house and grieving over her dead mother. Thing totally go awry when Rosalie starts to act more and more like a little psychopath, drawing morbid pictures of her family and hiring her "friends" from the woods to kill people that get in her way. There's some eerie atmosphere in "The Child" as well as some ominous guiding music and macabre scenery. The pacing is slow, though, and there's much too much weirdness going on that remains unexplained. The kid is okay, I guess, but not half as creepy as the juvenile murderers in "The Children", "Bloody Birthday" or "Village of the Damned". The budget obviously was very limited, resulting in poor editing and cheesy make-up effects. Not a bad little movie, but you'll forget about it pretty soon.
Not great, but not bad, either, The Child is a lot like Dawn of the Dead or Night of the Living Dead set in the late 1930s. The cars and sets look like the era they are set in (the 1930s) but the sitter Aliceanne wears a dress that looks like it is more from the 1890s and both she and the adult son of the farmer have 1970s hair styles - not much consistency in this period drama! The film is also inconsistent in its lighting, as one scene will have daylight, the next scene will be night, then go back to day, etc. While it does have some technical flaws and takes a while to get exciting, it does turn into a good zombie movie in the final twenty minutes. The two heroes (unknown performers who look a lot like a young Susan Dey and Michael Cole from the Mod Squad) have to try to fight off a group of zombies in a remote shack, in the film's exciting climax. The zombies themselves amble along like the creatures in the films of George Romero, but have excellent makeup and look quite demonic. It is not completely like Romero's films, in that zombies are not rampaging throughout all of the setting of 1930s America in this movie, but you do get the same sense of desperation and hopelessness in this production by Harry Novak. The script does plod along and you really never get to know any of the characters well (even Aliceanne acts a bit strange at times), but it is worth a look if you can find it. Reminded me of what would happen if a bunch of zombies attacked the Waltons!
