Bless the Child

31 Days of Horror: Day 2

There are three important things you can take from the promotional poster for Bless the Child.  First and foremost, there is a "child" that "just turned six," so we have a horror movie with a child actor.  Not necessarily a bad sign, but worth noting.  Second, the word "bless" and the upside-down(-ish) crucifix of light imply that this is a story that will deal with Christian (probably Catholic) beliefs.  That means demons, the devil and/or possession; given the large number of crappy possession movies out there, that should set off a warning light.  Finally, the tagline "Mankind's last hope just turned six" tells us that the advertising team did not have anything cool in the script to draw from.  To put that in perspective, Leprechaun: In the Hood has the tagline "Evil's in the house."  I think it's safe to say that this is going to be a rough one to watch.

Bless the Child begins with Maggie (Kim Basinger) coming home after a long day of nurse work.  Waiting on her front stoop, though, is a bum. Maggie does her best to shoo the bum away, but it turns out that the bum is actually her sister, Jenna (Angela Bettis)!  Jenna has always been the black sheep of the family, and it's been years since the two have seen each other.  So, Jenna, how're you doing?

Yeesh.  Not so well, it seems.  The titular child that needs blessing happens to be Jenna's.  Jenna appears to be homeless and jobless, with a heroin habit and a brand-new baby from an unknown father.  On the other hand, it looks like she lost the baby weight ridiculously fast.  Well, that's heroin for you.  After some clumsy exposition where the two family members make sure to explain their motives and history out loud to each other, Jenna shouts "not it" (not really) and scrambles out into the streets, leaving Maggie to raise the infant on her own (really).  Fast-forward a few years and the infant is now Cody (Holliston Coleman), a six-year-old autistic child.  And if you've seen enough movies, then you know that "autistic" is interchangeable with "unique."  In Cody's case, she is able to do all sorts of cool stuff, like spin things with her mind and raise the dead.  Oddly enough, adults seem oblivious to these talents, probably because they're common symptoms of autism.  Maggie only appears to be impressed with Cody's ability to chase away her boyfriends.

"I know you look like Kim Basinger and all, but women who care about kids are a major turn-off.  Later."

Meanwhile, local police have been baffled by a number of child murders in the area.  An FBI occult expert, Agent Travis (Jimmy Smits), believes that the murders have been made in a ritualistic, Satan-worshiping kind of way.  But why?  And how are they getting all these six-year-old kids?

"Hey kid, do you want a nice, warm bowl of murder?"

That is when Jenna shows up again, cleaned up and with a rich husband in tow.  Her husband, Eric (Rufus Sewell), is the multimillionaire leader of a child outreach group/satanic cult, which doesn't sound like it should be a lucrative profession.

"Most of my money comes from pleasuring hobos"

Jenna and Eric want custody of Cody.  But Cody doesn't even know them, much less trust them or feel safe around them.  Eric gives Maggie an ultimatum --- if she fights them, he will crush her in court.  But if she considers giving them custody, they will steal away Cody when she's not looking.  They're tough negotiators.  Why do Jenna and Eric want Cody so badly, all of a sudden?  What's the deal with all the dead kids?  Is it important that Cody has the same birthday as them?  And why does Cody appear to have super-spinning powers?  Let's just say that someone born on that particular day, six years ago, might be a child of God.  Does that clear everything up?  No?  Tough.

Basinger, after the script hit her on the head with Christ parallels

The acting in Bless the Child should, for the most part, be varnished to keep it from harm while you try to destroy your copy of the movie.  Kim Basinger is bland, at best, in the lead role. It almost feels like she doesn't understand English, and she just memorized her lines phonetically; she would say "we're out of milk" with the same emphasis as "a naked man is wearing a horse carcass in my bathroom."  Maybe she thought her character was unfamiliar with the concept of human emotions, or maybe Basinger is a bad actress.  Rufus Sewell, who typically relishes villain roles, isn't much better.  His problem is that his character is supposed to be evil, and Sewell sleepwalks through the scenes where he is killing and drugging folks.  He puts most of his effort into the scenes where he tries (and fails) to out-argue a six-year-old.  As far as evil goes, that's some pretty minor league stuff, Mr. Movie Villain.  Jimmy Smits is actually okay, but I question the likelihood of a single FBI agent having the freedom to follow whatever cases he likes.  What is this, The X-Files?  Christina Ricci also makes a brief appearance as a former cult member.  She gives the best performance in the movie, and she isn't even that impressive.  She just spoke like a rational person.

"Seriously, it's not that hard.  What's wrong with the rest of you?"

Ian Holm has an even smaller part, and is gone after a handfull of lines.  As for the rest of the allegedly main cast, Angela Bettis is uniformly awful and alters her performance significantly in every scene she is in.  Little Holliston Coleman is fine as far as child actors go, but her role is more of an object than a character, so she doesn't make a great impact on the film, one way or the other.

Bless the Child was directed by Chuck Russell, who was presumably hired for his horror-directing experience.  I don't know what to say about his direction. Well, I don't know what nice things I can say about his direction.  Just because the man is a veteran in the genre doesn't mean he has the slightest clue as to how a supernatural horror movie should work.  The acting is all over the place, from incredibly bland to inappropriately manic, to hilariously melodramatic.  The action is handled poorly and unconvincingly; Russell apparently believes that severing heads doesn't get messy until the head falls off the body.

Look ma, no arterial spray!

The pacing is abysmal.  How long would it take for a complete stranger to convince you to kidnap a child from her wealthy and powerful rightful parents?  If you answered anything longer than "two minutes," then you are simply not qualified to direct Bless the Child.  Let me put it to you another way; in a movie about ritual worship and devil worshipers, the scariest thing is a ginger with an afro.

He sees the world with his dark eye and the nether realm with the pale one

There are two conventional ways for a supernatural horror movie to be frightening.  Either a supernatural being shows up and starts some shit, or humans acting on behalf of a creature do some extraordinarily reprehensible stuff, like eating human hearts or something like that.  Bless the Child opts for "C: None of the Above."  Sure, there is some dabbling in both of those key areas, but the otherworldly do little damage and the most reprehensible things in the script happen completely off-camera.  There are only three on-screen deaths before the climax of this movie.  One is a bum who is set on fire, another is a dude who gets knitting needles in his eyes, and the other is the victim of allergies (assuming she was allergic to blunt force trauma and knives).  None of these are mysterious, creepy, or show any direct connection to the supernatural stuff that is happening in the rest of the movie.  It doesn't fit the tone that the film is failing to set.

Bless the Child isn't just a bad movie, though. It is thoroughly and unintentionally ridiculous. Let's take the cult as an example. It is most popular with teens and twentysomethings, which makes sense, because most parents support their child's aspirations to someday drink the Kool-Aid. What I love to laugh at with the cult is that the kids --- the ones on the inner circle, anyway --- all dress in black, wear trench coats, and have bad haircuts. Because nothing says "join our cult" like surly teens dressed like Bauhaus fans. The logic of the cult members is hilarious, too. There's a fire in a church at the climax of the movie, and some serious shit goes down. Apparently, though, nobody left the burning building until the police showed up; some even stayed in the fire, apparently so they could jump out and get shot by cops.  Nothing tops the arguments between Eric and Cody, though.  Eric wants Cody to accept the Devil as her buddy because God doesn't exist (because one existing without the other makes total sense).  How does he plan to force this six-year-old to join his side?  Not by threatening to kill the only mother Cody has ever known.  Not by promising to reunite her with the biological mother that she has never seen.  Not even through something primal and ugly, like mutilation.  No, Eric tries to convince her through logic. And fails miserably.

This was in response to her saying "You first."  Honest.

Dude.  She's six.  If you can't change a six-year-old's mind, how the hell do you run a cult?  There are all sorts of idiotic moments in Bless the Child, and their silliness is the only thing that makes this movie bearable.

Oh, and you know how a real horror movie would have the bad guys try to kill Maggie?  They would probably chain her up, or feed her to a demon or something awesome. Not in this movie.  No, these jerks capture her, drug her, place her in a car and stage a car accident.  But they don't kill her and then fix the car to drive off a cliff, or anything reasonably simple like that.

Maggie, explaining the way they should have killed her

Instead, they set it up so that Maggie's car is speeding across a bridge during rush hour in the wrong lane; Maggie (who was drugged, but not killed) wakes up just in time to swerve out of traffic, and a nice stranger helps her not plummet to her death in the water below.  Think about that for a few moments.  Yes, it's kind of a waste for a complete random to be the one who saves Maggie, but that's not what irks me about this part.  These cult punks are complete morons (which might explain their involvement in a cult...).  First of all, Maggie is drugged, but they skimped on the knockout juice?  That's incompetent, but I suppose waste not, want not; if she had died, they could save the drugs they saved on their next Oscar-winning victim.  The choice in where to stage the crash was pretty odd, though.  Since she was unconscious, wouldn't the cult need to spend a good amount of time and effort getting her in place and the car rigged to make the plan work?  How does a downtown metropolitan area with a heavily-traveled bridge fit in to those requirements?  It seems to me like they would have had to stop traffic, set up the car, toss Maggie in, and aim it at oncoming traffic.  At that point, wouldn't it just be subtler to dismember her body on live television?

This is the proper reaction to that scene

I understand that a director can only do so much when the script he's working with can't even stimulate a mediocre tagline, but there's a lot of obviously stupid stuff in this movie.  Had the acting been better or if the mood was even a little tense or suspenseful, I would give the director a break.  Oh, well.  The only thing Chuck Russell did right was editing it into a comprehensible narrative.  Sadly, this movie is too slow-paced and the funny bits are too rare to make this film even approach the realm of so-bad-it's-good.  Instead, this is simply an awful movie made more noteworthy by the fact that this (and I Dreamed of Africa) was Kim Basinger's first post-Oscar work.  That puts Bless the Child into the same conversations where Halle Berry's Catwoman pops up, and that's never a good thing.

...and I'm only being this generous because the car crash scene almost made me spit out my beer.

Batman (1989)

Is it too bold to call Batman the most influential film of the past 25 years?  Sure, Saving Private Ryan changed battle scenes forever, and Pulp Fiction popularized nonsequential storytelling and awesome dialogue, but I really think there is a case to be made for Batman.  For starters, this is the first "dark" take on any comic book hero; before this, you had the campiness of Batman: The Movie (1966) and Flash Gordon (aaa-AAA-aaa!!!)

This was the first big-budget comic book movie, the first one to make a controversial casting choice (Mr. Mom as Batman?), the first one to take something resembling a real-life look at superheroes (look ma, no spandex!), and the first superhero movie to get award recognition (it won an Oscar and had an acting Golden Globe nomination --- an acting nomination in a comic book movie!).  This is the film that allowed Tim Burton to do whatever he wanted for the next ten or fifteen years.  Heck, this is the sole reason they made the fantastic Batman: The Animated Series, and that alone is enough of a legacy for me.

So, even though you already know the basics, I'm going to run through the Bat-plot.  The movie opens with a couple of thugs robbing a family in Gotham City and making off with their spoils.  Naturally, they go up to the rooftop of a building to do this, because going to a hideout, alley, apartment, or their car would be much too private.  One of the thugs is nervous that "the Bat" will come after them; he heard that so-and-so got dropped off a building by the Bat.  Naturally, that's nonsense.  That is when Batman (Michael Keaton) suddenly appears.  He kicks the ever-loving crap out of one guy, but then takes a bullet to the chest and goes down.  But he doesn't stay down.  He get right back up and scares the remaining thug; Batman politely tells him to spread the word to all his hoodlum friends that Batman is protecting Gotham City's streets.  I detail this opening scene for a reason, but I'll get to that later.

Basically, this is a "Batman Begins" before Batman Begins.  Bats is a fairly new sight in town, more of an urban legend than a known entity.  The police are not sure what to make of him, either, but they've got other things on their plate.  Organized crime has Gotham City under siege.  Instead of doing the logical thing and calling Steven Seagal, Lawman, to fix their problems, Gothamites instead opt to elect a new District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams) to help Police Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle) in his war on crime.  Their "war" is not terribly effective, though, as local mob kingpin Carl Grissom (Jack Palance) and his number two man, Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson), are having their way with the town.  Things start to get complicated when Grissom realizes that Napier is sleeping with his fugly girlfriend, Alicia (Jerry Hall), and sets Jack up to get busted by the police. In the ensuing raid, the police (with the help of Batman) manage to back Napier into a corner, only to have him "accidentally" fall into a vat of dangerous chemicals.  Dangerous, but not apparently lethal.  Jack Napier survived his chemical bath with only a few side-effects: chalky white shin, green hair, his cheek muscles frozen into a big grin, and little to no sanity.  The Joker has arrived.

Meanwhile, a couple of reporters, Alex Knox (Robert "Arliss" Wuhl) and Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), are trying to dig into the Batman story.  Does he exist?  Does he work for the police?  Why are there no photos of him?  Et cetera?  Et cetera?  Little do they realize that the mysterious and wealthy Bruce Wayne spends his evenings dressing up as a giant bat to fight crime.  If I was a reporter and saw all the customized and expensive equipment Batman had (Hello?  Batmobile?  He even has a Batplane!), I would certainly begin suspecting the nearest millionaire, but that's just me.  Can Batman handle these two muckrakers and still defend the city against a sociopath who has just upgraded to psychopath?  And what about love?  Does he have time for love?  Oh, wait...sorry...I got "love" and "beating the hell out of criminals" mixed up again.

This is a movie that changed the industry.  For better or for worse, there would be no Spider-Man, X-Men, or Watchmen without the success of Batman, much less any of the dozens of lesser-known works that have become movies over the past few years.  The first thing this movie does right is in the set design department.  Gotham City looks awesome.  It's big, tall, imposing, and dirty --- the perfect place for crime to breed.  Wayne Manor is perfect, too; it's big, imposing, and museum-like --- absolutely the last place you would want to eat soup.  The costumes are good, too.  It was nice to finally see a superhero that wasn't wearing his underwear on the outside of his outfit.  And, since Batman has no super-powers, adding things like bulletproof armor makes sense; his tools on his utility belt looked real and effective, too.  Of course, Batman's vehicles looked awesome, even if the Batmobile is impractical for city driving.

Right.  It's that easy to find street parking for this beast.

Once you get past the sets, costumes, and props, what are you left with?  Some surprisingly solid acting, actually.  I've always liked Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman, partially because he was able to convey both distraction and mental unrest separately, and also because he made a pretty good Batman.  Let's be honest, though --- his charming Bruce Wayne performance is what grounds this movie.  This is essentially the only action role Keaton ever played, so kudos to Tim Burton for having the vision to cast him.  Of course, you can't talk about Batman without mentioning Jack Nicholson's performance as the Joker.  I think Nicholson's work here has been diminished in the past few years by Heath Ledger's amazing performance in The Dark Knight, but that's a little unfair.  The key comic stories that inspired Ledger's performance had not been written yet when this film was being shot; I know Tim Burton often credits The Killing Joke as inspiration for his movie, but it was published a month before pre-production started for this movie, so I doubt it had much of an impact.  Despite this, Nicholson came off as a devious, dangerous loon, and he's a hell of a lot of fun to watch.  Besides, he manages to look good while wearing a purple suit.  He's no Prince, but he still looks good.  Heck, his Jack Napier performance alone was good enough for its own movie.  Aside from the powerful performances from the two lead actors, most of the supporting cast was only decent.  Michael Gough did a good job as Alfred, Bruce Wayne's fatherly butler, and Tracey Walter (who got the job just because he's friends with Nicholson) was awesome as the Joker's henchman Bob, but the rest were pretty dull.  That's too bad, because Billy Dee Williams is capable of a little more than that (but not much more).  As for Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Jack Palance,  Jerry Hall and the rest...well, they played their parts.  I'll give Jerry Hall some credit --- I have trouble differentiating between her pre-Joker-deformed face and her regular one.  Wait..."credit" was probably the wrong term to use there...

Tim Burton's direction is pretty good, but it is a little dated.  Yes, Batman was surprisingly and refreshingly gritty in 1989.  Yes, he got good (even great) performances from his two lead actors.  The look and feel of the movie are great.  And yet, there is a lot more campiness in this film than I remembered.  Most of it deals with Joker's henchmen; they all have matching, custom-made uniforms, drive professionally detailed Joker-themed cars, and are willing to die for the Joker for reasons I cannot fathom.  As amazing as Bob's final scene is, if I was dumb enough to be a villain's henchman, that would have been the moment I decided to retire.  As for Burton's "dark" take on the characters, it has gotten comparatively lighter with time.  When Batman was first released, it was a revelation to the general public that wasn't nerdy enough to have studied The Dark Knight Returns already.  Over twenty years later, though, it almost feels quaint, especially when compared to Batman Returns and the Christopher Nolan movies.  Despite all that, I think this was a monumental effort by Burton to go against expectations and risk a lot of money on an idea that had no guarantee of success.  Is this Burton's best work?  No, it's not even his best Batman movie.  It is, however, the godfather of the new millennium's summer blockbusters, and it deserves some respect, dammit.

The story doesn't deserve as much respect, though.  I like that this isn't an origin story for Batman, but I wish it was a little less silly at times.  What's so silly?  In a word, the Batplane.  In two words, Joker's revolver.  Let's ignore the idiocy of characters that live in fear of the Joker when he poisons their groceries, but dance in the streets with him if he's giving away money --- that obviously won't have a catch, right?  By the way, Arliss, if there is poison gas killing people all around you, a paper face mask isn't going to protect you.  Thank goodness there are no police near this publicly advertised parade.  Am I the only one who wonders how Batman's identity remains a secret after this movie?  He crashed his custom-made Batplane.  Commissioner Gordon should be fired if he lets his CSI team investigate the wreckage and not track down a manufacturer.

And what about the scene where Bruce Wayne is trying to explain to Vicki Vale that he's Batman?  Man, this scene is a sign of the times.  Wayne tries to explain it to her by talking about personalities having different aspects, and sometimes it's almost like you have to lead another life to express yourself fully.  If this scene was shot today, we would naturally assume that Bruce Wayne is gay.  Instead, Vicki assumes that he is married.  I guess, with Robin out of the picture, there is a little more leeway in that discussion.

Back to the story.  Let's focus on that first scene, where Batman is introduced.  I don't like that Batman, who has been strictly a non-killing vigilante since the 1940s, has been rumored to kill random thugs.  Sure, it's just a rumor, but it still bugs me --- and I'm pretty sure he lets a few random thugs fall to their deaths in the chapel scene, too.  Not cool, Bats.  I also don't like that Batman lets a random street thug pull a gun on him, much less shoot him in the chest and knock him off his Batfeet.  Maybe I just have a little more respect for Batman than most screenwriters, but I think Batman comes off as occasionally amateurish in this movie.  I mean, he has the balls to dress up for Halloween every night and attack violent criminals; you would think he would be a smarter, tougher, meaner opponent than "you shot me, so now I'll scare you."  Even this horribly written comic book panel grasps the Batman idea better than these screenwriters.

Despite the story weaknesses, this is still a fun movie to watch.  I'll admit to nitpicking some of those problems; I just think Batman is an awesome character that deserves the best.  Batman changed what we expected from comic book adaptations and has led to dozens of awesome (and some godawful) action movies since.  It's cool, fun, and influential.  Sure, it's a little silly, but what do you expect from a movie about a guy who dresses up like a rodent to fight crime?

On a closing note, I can't resist mentioning the Batman soundtrack, which was composed by Prince.  I always giggle when I imagine how excited Warner Brothers was to have multi-platinum (and Warner Brothers property) Prince do the whole soundtrack...and then he turned in "Batdance."  Seriously, what the hell was that?

I love me some Prince (he is The Man, after all...well, he's The Kid, anyway), but the success of this soundtrack astounds me.  It topped the Billboard charts and had four legitimately successful singles, including "Batdance," which somehow became a Number One hit single.  That has to be one of the dumbest hit singles of the 80s, and I know there is a lot of competition for that crown.  The public did benefit from this soundtrack in two distinct ways.  First and foremost, we got to see that Prince could be a convincing comic book character (nice hair).  Second, "Batdance" was followed as a single by "Partyman," which means that the first two hit singles from this album were both over seven minutes long.  I dare you to find another album that pulls that off.  Prince is The Man!