Bless the Child

After calling himself "Charles" for two movies, one might hope that director Chuck Russell had finally thrown off mainstream pretensions and returned to his pulp-horror roots (Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Blob). Alas, his latest so-called horror film is essentially The Golden Child minus intentional laughs and any reference to those heathen Eastern religions. Academy Award winner Kim Basinger (who's only slightly more deserving of that trophy than, say, Anna Nicole Smith) plays a nurse who discovers that her near-autistic niece has been designated as a Prophet of God in training. Basinger must therefore save her niece from a former child star (Dark City's Rufus Sewell) who hides his secret love of Satan behind a vast network of litigious self-help centers clearly modeled on a certain Hollywood-based cult. All of God's faithful are of course, Irish or Latino, which naturally designates them as Catholic, while Satan's flock wear black, do drugs, and try to use secular humanism to convince the world that God doesn't exist and morality is therefore relative. Such preaching would be almost offensive if the film weren't so nonsensical -- practically every single device used to move the plot along seems to materialize out of nowhere (rule one when protecting a sacred child: Don't give her the bedroom that has a gigantic scary gargoyle directly outside the window). And there are some enjoyably goofy computer-generated rats, bats, and goblins to keep us amused. Still, Bless the Child isn't exactly worth paying for, even as camp, although it's perfectly easy to sit through, and thankfully less earnest than similar films (Stigmata). Oh, and Christina Ricci and Ian Holm show up for a combined 15 minutes of screen time, presumably because they needed to make car payments or something.