The Child

When I say the "bread and butter" of 70s drive-in horror, I mean movies like this one came and went, forgotten and/or never seen by the majority. But it was films like this that kept drive-ins and smaller movie houses in business. I am so

thankful for the age of the DVD. With the DVD era, companies such as Anchor

Bay, Something Weird Video (Image), Blue Underground, Shriek Show, and

many others have brought back lost cult classics (and not so cult classics) so that new generations can discover them, and the older generations can

rediscover them.

"The Child" has all the right ingredients for a b-horror movie. A little bit of homemade special effect gore, a soundtrack that gives you the creeps, zombies, and it set in the countryside. It may have it's slow parts, but the final 20 minutes or so deliver the goods in fine 70s b-grade fashion. You will be getting startled one minute, then laughing the next (unintentionally of course).

Rosilan (Rosalie Cole) is a girl with some problems-like her psychic abilities that allow her to talk to her dead mother, levitate objects, and raise the dead.

From producer Harry ("Axe","Rituals", "Hitch-Hike To Hell" and plenty of soft core flicks) Novak comes "The Child", an uneven but still watchable take on the Zombie movie. The movie itself takes a while to get going, and like many movies of this type, the acting is terrible (especially Rosalie Cole, whose character is too much of a brat to be interesting or threatening), and the electronic score by Rob Wallace is grating.

Still, when the final 20 minutes kick in, the movie kicks up. There's some nice moments, and the zombies themselves, while not Romero or Fulci levels, are still pretty creepy. The make up effects are also pretty good, especially considering the movie's budget.

"The Child" is an alright Bad Seed movie, only with the supernatural and the living dead instead of a killer kid. Don't go into it expecting much, and you might sort of enjoy it. It would make a nice double bill movie with "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things", I'll tell you that.

Despite an interesting premise, this film doesn't deliver. Attempted as a period piece(probably because someone was able to get a-hold of some vintage 1930's cars)set in the 30s/40s, this flick involves a young housekeeper hired by a farmer to care for his house and young daughter after his wife's death. The daughter, Rosalie, apparently shares a penchance for telekenesis with her departed mother, and uses her unusual mental powers to reanimate putrid corpses and use them to hack apart people she doesn't like. The naive young housekeeper gradually becomes aware of Rosalie's strange abilities and eventually runs afoul of the little girl's graveyard friends!

This film doesn't really succeed in the period detail department, primarily because the housekeeper spends nine-tenths of the movie in peasant dresses, not exactly the going fashion in 1939 or whenever this movie was supposed to be set. A quibble to be sure, but come on, the wardrobe people could have tried more. The flick does have some nice atmosphere, with dark woods, brooding sunsets, and lots of dark interior shots. And there is a half-baked attempt to establish a romance between the housekeeper and the farmer's adult son. Nothing in the way of camp or bad acting to recommend it, but probably not a bad way to kill ninety minutes

If you can get around the horrible soundtrack and cheap special effects you might actually like this movie. I did.

It's sort of a Carrie meets The Night Of The Living Dead clone about a little girl who lives with her father and brother in some isolated backwoods community. She spends her nights at the graveyard deep in the woods behind her house.

A sitter arrives from the big city to help take care of the little girl and soon discovers the rash of killings in the community might have something to do with the 12-year old. When the sitter realizes that the little girl has the power to move and animate inanimate objects it becomes crystal clear about just what she has been doing at the graveyard all those nights.

I adored this movie. The title Kill and Go Hide conjured up so many idea's in my mind that I just had to see it and I wasn't disappointed. It is heavy on the cheese factor in some scenes and actually quite frightening in others. There is a scene where the babysitter awakens from a slumber at four a.m. and looks out her window at a scarecrow hanging on a post. What came next kind of gave me a chill. I also enjoyed the stormy grave side promise from the little girl to her deceased mother. "I promise you, they'll pay."

Of course not much was to be expected of this movie but that doesn't make the viewing experience of it any better. It's an obviously cheap movie, that got poorly put together by an also very obviously inexperienced cast and crew.

I'm taking into consideration the budget and time that went into this movie and in that regard it really isn't an horrible picture and on some levels actually quite an achievement but the overall end result isn't exactly anything that I would recommend to anybody.

Thing with this movie is that it's storytelling never really flows pleasantly. The movie has an hard time finding the right pace and its story and writing isn't helping very much. It often is all over the place and is heading in all kinds of different directions. The one moment it's more of a psychological horror, the other a gory slasher and then the other suddenly a weird sort of zombie flick. Not a very consistent movie with its horror, nor with its story. It does not only confuse me, it also annoys, which is arguable even worse.

But something that annoyed me way more (next to its acting) was the absolutely horrible soundtrack this movie had. It was so incredibly noisy and without rhythm or tone that it almost caused my head to explode at several points throughout the movie.

But these cheap sort of '70's genre movies are not without its charm really. It actually only adds to the movie its atmosphere that this isn't a perfect looking movie and features some shaky camera-work and cheap effects in it. If you can enjoy these sort of movies, this one is still worth giving a go.

For everybody else; just skip it!

4/10

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