Herald rating: *
Cast: Kim Basinger, Jimmy Smits, Holliston Coleman, Christina Ricci
Director: Chuck Russell
Rating: R16 (horror scenes, violence)
Running Time: 107 minutes
Screening: Village, Hoyts cinemas
Review: Russell Baillie
While having a kid with special powers at its centre might get this horror a Sixth Sense comparison on paper, it's really a
hangover from last year's pre-millennial end-is-nigh movies.
You remember them. Arnie Schwarzenegger fighting Satan in End of Days, Patricia Arquette making a mess of the carpet in Stigmata and a whole bunch of others.
Like them, Bless the Child is steeped in mouldy Catholic mysticism, bad special effects and a soundtrack of really ominous Gregorian chanting.
But not only is it late, it's stupid.
It also has Kim Basinger, whose performance manages, against some stiff competition from the effects department, to be one of the most unconvincing elements here.
She is out-acted by her hair - how unruly her locks get are a far better indication of her emotional state than anything else she can muster.
She's a divorced psychiatric nurse from New York whose junkie sister leaves her a baby girl to care for.
By the time the freckled kid turns 6 she's been diagnosed as autistic. But she also starts exhibiting some special qualities. Back from drugdom comes her real Mom with new husband (Sewell), a reformed child TV star who's now touting his own self-help programme, which is a front for a cult.
Cody is snatched away and Basinger turns to FBI ritual-crime expert Smits who seems to be suffering the curse of David Caruso in his first post-NYPD Blue big screen role.
Actually, there's something particularly repelling about how those murders become a background issue to Basinger's bad hair day, especially in the depiction of one child's abduction and the finding of his mutilated body.
There is one genuinely fun scene where Basinger wakes up from a drugged sleep to find herself driving on a Manhattan bridge the wrong way. And one good line - when a bunch of kids at Cody's special-needs school are crowded around a supposedly dead pigeon, Basinger asks one of the nuns if they have a concept of death. "Oh yes," she says, "I blame The Lion King."
The pigeon was lucky to have knocked itself out early, as along the way Bless The Child offers death by immolation, knitting needle and ritual sacrifice to the man downstairs.
The devil may get all the best tunes, but this is further proof he just gets the worst movies.
