There’s an
old saying: Bless the Child,
Spare the Audience.
Well, it should
be an old saying. And you’d wished the producers thought about
this before they went through the effort of spending millions on
this lame turkey. Taking a closer look at one of the men pulling the
financial strings you’ll see why this clunker got the green light.
Executive puppeteer Mace Neufeld must be going through the same
mid-career crisis that afflicted Jerry Bruckheimer. Just as the
latter’s Coyote Ugly
reshaped his Flashdance,
Neufeld is returning to a quarter-century-old success (The
Omen) hoping to rekindle box office gold after the dregs of The General’s Daughter, Lost
in Space, and Black Dog.
Bottom line: Paramount’s got deviled egg on its face. The husband
and wife scriptwriting team of Clifford and Ellen Green (Baby, Space Camp, The
Seventh Sign) get rewrite assistance from Tom Rickman (Coal
Miner’s Daughter, Truman),
but the final dreary effort is just a contrived mishmash of
been-there-done-that, devil’s-gonna-get-you, cat-and-mouse waste
of your time. Effects-laden director Chuck Russell may have scored
well overseas with Eraser,
his last effort four years ago, but he’s still riding the now
threadbare coattails of 1994’s comedy crime fantasy The
Mask.
Stigmata,
End of Days, and now Bless the Days is
the latest demonic disaster you’d be wise to avoid. If you need a "Save
My Child From Satan" fix, hold off a month of so for the ultimate
Linda Blair witch project, The
Exorcist, back in enhanced, digitized sound, re-release glory at
darkened theaters everywhere. For the next few weeks, top-billed Kim
Basinger’s newest release is another inadequate choice destined to
make a few more bucks (but not many) that her spring feature I
Dreamed of Africa. I guess you could double-bill these with the
tagline "Bless the beasts and the children," but not many of you
will get the twenty-eight-year-old pun. No one should spend good
money on either of these films anyway. That’s a BIG hint for those
of you planning to rent or buy (the fools among you) Africa.
Bless
the Child starts out with
cutesy gothic credits, a supernaturally en-chanting score, and the
typical on-every-corner stone gargoyle outside your Manhattan
apartment window. If that isn’t enough for psychiatric nurse
Maggie O’Connor (Basinger) to see the writing on the wall, she has
a perfect stranger spouting Christmas celestial seasonings at her
about a Star of Lieberman aligning with Santa Claus, who wins the
lotto. Well, maybe I missed something with the woman’s Caribbean
accent (I think she was a Republican, too), but the real fakery
starts soon enough: the snow’s falling from a cloudless sky. Nine
days later Maggie’s strung-out, drug addicted sister Jenna (Angela
Bettis) dumps her fatherless daughter in the lap of her infertile
sibling before heading back to New York’s rain swept streets for a
six-year bum’s vacation. Fast forward three, then six years to
find the ever unlucky in love Maggie devoting her very protective
affections to raising a semi-autistic Cody (Holliston Coleman) and
fighting off rodent-filled visions (or are they just lots of little
Mickey Mice).
Meanwhile
6-6-6-year olds are disappearing off the streets of the naked city.
The cops are too dumb to realize something’s rotten at the core,
except for FBI agent John Travis (Jimmy Smits), a former seminary
student and now Big Apple occult-related crime honcho who seems to
know his bible and tattoos. Unfortunately he doesn’t realize all
the dead/missing youngsters share the same birth date. December 16,
1993—if you care. My first thought was: hey, the cops can’t be
that dumb not to realize a handful of the city’s youngest have a
similar distinctive date with destiny. Well, perhaps they aren’t
that smart. But Mr. Big Shot G-Man (actually the screenwriters) must
have had a complete brain meltdown after the second snatching not to
start WARNING parents with kids the same age to be on the lookout
for some really nasty people.
Soon we realize
Cody has some "special" abilities, like being able to pop tupperware
and rattle fine china, an endowment that pops the interest and the
ever-wide bug eyes of smirk-faced Eric Stark (Dark
City’s Rufus Sewell), a.k.a. the Dark Side. Though never fully
explained, he’s seemingly pulled Jenna off the streets through his
monstrously successful (according to Leeza Gibbons!) cult-like
self-help youth organization, Devil Worship for Dummies (a.k.a. The
New Dawn Foundation: send in your children and $400 contributions
today) as a means to shanghai her daughter from the flustered aunt.
He’s even brought along the Zombie Nosferatu Nanny from Hell (Dimitra
Arlys), who’s short a pint or two of affection.
Review by Elias Savada · Nitrate Online
