The Child (a.k.a. Zombie Child)

Rosalie (Rosalie Cole) is an evil little brat whose mother was killed by "tramps" and whose weird old grandpa (Frank Janson) has a creepy old house next to a cemetery where her "friends" rise from the grave to do her bidding. Along for the ride is "Alicianne Del Mar" (Laurel Barnett), an Alexandre Moltke stand-in who comes to be the nanny or something. Everybody drives a classic car from the Thirties, but nobody looks as if they emerged from that era; women didn't wear their hair that long in the 1930s.

The Child (a.k.a. Zombie Child, also a.k.a. Children of the Night, a.k.a. Hide and Go Kill) has an incredibly interesting experimental soundtrack that is overpowering and annoying at first (over-utilized, so to speak, too much), but this gets better as the film proceeds. Alicianne makes it to Grandpa's house by way of the cemetery after seeing a bloody dead cat and a clawed hand. Some weird old woman (Ruth Ballan) invites her over for tea. The whole thing is undeniably amateurish and cheapjack; performances are wooden, and the dialogue seems dubbed. The soundtrack, by Rob Wallace, while interesting in and of itself, often detracts from the impact of what would otherwise be scenes where suspense could have been built. Instead, the loud, weird music (which sometimes sounds, I kid you not, like synthesized duck calls) annoys, and what should have been the film's contemplative and eerie "silences" become like grating nails across a blackboard.

It's been pointed out by commentators that the film's underlying plot points are rather an unlikely combination: a telekinetic little girl controls zombies so she can use them to get revenge on tramps and others she holds responsible for killing her mother. (She draws little cartoons and crosses out her victims as they are dispatched.) The film was inspired by Night of the Living Dead, but, unlike that film, the filmmakers here (the Armenian duo of Robert Voskanian and Robert Dadashian) had to have a "gateway" or transition from the "reality" of the picture to the zombie apocalypse. Hence, they seem to have cross-pollinated Dark Shadows with Night, and the result is a film where, unfortunately, the character of Little Rosalie gets somehow lost, and the focus of the film switches from a psychic or possessed little girl hellbent on revenge to three shuffling, shambling zombies who attack for reasons that are ultimately unclear.

There are some great splattery killings and mutilations here: a "tramp" gloating over Rosalie's mom's jewels gets it from a menacing zombie, and the front of his too-white shirt is slathered in blood (which, unfortunately, like so many of these pictures, looks like it should be slathered on top of a pizza crust along with mozzarella and black olives), and various people get their eyes gouged out and faces ripped to murky, messy pools of dripping, oozing red. (How's that for poetic license?) Does this save the picture, mollifying it somewhat and making what otherwise could have been mediocre dreck into somewhat superior dreck?

None of the performers here, it should be noted, had any previous acting experience. Both of the directors' parents served, according to Wikipedia, as caterers. It was partly filmed in an abandoned convent, and God only knows where the composer, who I could have sworn led Scotland against the English back during the Dark Ages (and I don't mean for the World Cup), got the notion to like, really take the incidental music out on such an avant-garde limb. But the picture redeems itself in the second half, and, though it does get interesting and bloody right before the conclusion, it ends on an ambiguous and dream-like note, making you wonder if everything you had hitherto witnessed was only a dream.

But this movie is no dream. It's a nightmare. Just, not always in the way the viewer anticipates.

The Child - Original Trailer HD (Robert Voskanian, 1977)

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