The Child
USA 1977. Director: Robert Voskanian
Cast: Laurel Barnett, Frank Jansen, Richard Hanners, Rosalie Cole
Aka: Kill and Go Hide

A young woman, Alice (Barnett), arrives to a solitary farmhouse deep in the woods to begin her work as a nanny. The daughter in this house, Rosalie (Cole), is a bit weird. Every night she sneaks out to meet someone, she won't say who. It turns out that Rosalie wants to get back on her dad, because dad has had mom killed. So at nights Rosalie goes to the graveyard and awakes the dead, commanding them to do her dirty work, i.e kill dad and everyone else who Rosalie doesn't like. And she is beginning to dislike Alice very much.

The performances are hillariously stilted and the film is obviously shot with a minimal budget. However, there is a creepy and claustrophobic feel to The Child, something which money just can't buy. Kinda like the first Evil Dead movie. The photography is dark and gritty and the soundtrack is a chilling experience in its own right. Extremely loud, noisy and expressionist electronic music, drowning dialogue and everything. The story itself moves a bit slow at times, but that only adds to the macabre atmosphere, so stay patient. In the last reel Rosalie and the zombies runs amuck, chasing a hysterical Alice and the elder brother in the family into a mill-house. The zombie make-up is hardly convincing, the ghouls look like aliens from a '50s movie, but we do really only see them properly at the end, up until then they're mostly dark shadows in the woods, something which works okey. A proper and less forgiving reviewer would probably say that The Child is amateurish rubbish made in someone's backyard. I say it's an effective and atmospheric zip-budget gem, well worth sitting through. They definitely don't make them like this anymore.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.