Jul 14, 2019
The Child (1977)
"I don't think I'd like your friends very much, not if you have to meet them at night. That is why you go into the cemetery at night, isn't it? To meet these people, your friends?"
#The child#Creepy face#Creepy image#american cinema#Horror film#1977#films i done watched#Also known as hide and go kill#But it's unclear if it was ever released under that title or if it was just a promotional thing#Robert Voskanian#Laurel Barnett#Rosalie cole#Frank janson#Richard Hanners#Ruth ballan#Slosson Bing Jong#Rod Medigovich#Ralph lucas#Rob wallace#Harry novak#An intensely frustrating experience. There is the germ of a brilliant film buried in here and at pretty much exactly the half way mark it#Really begins to do something different and visually arresting. A wonderfully ethereal dream sequence; some unique looking and#Disturbing zombie type creatures; a nightmare feel as the real and the imagined seem to blur. Unfortunately to get to that you have to#Wade through the first half: a turgid and poorly executed passage of very slow scene setting. Some issues run the whole film through#Shot on short ends and with a nothing budget it doesn't look great and the entire soundtrack is dubbed on in post (and badly at that)#It's quite literally one of the darkest horror films I've ever seen in that its impossible in places to tell what is happening for all the#Murk and gloom. Arrow have done what they can for a blu ray release but the source material is just too inferior to get a decent picture#Wallace's score (or at least the main theme) is a weirdly old fashioned piano concerto style thing but it works surprisingly well#Basically an American take on a lucio fulci film only even grottier looking. Not exactly bad but some annoyingly wasted potential#Why do so many rubbish horror films contain brilliant dream sequences? A question for the ages
