Silver Screams: Bless the Child (2000-dir. Chuck Russell)

For a while there it was very good to be Chuck Russell. At the age of 29 his first feature, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors (1987), turned a successful horror film into a beloved franchise. His next, The Blob (1988), solidified his reputation as someone who could marry grotesque eye-popping visual effects with wit and humor. These films remain high-water marks of 1980's American horror cinema, platonic ideals of the kind of creative rollicking good time people associate with the era. It's no shock that a movie like The Blob (1988) would lead to a movie like The Mask (1994), where his knack for comedy and special effects met the boundless energy of In Living Color star Jim Carrey. And when you look at the visual effects of these three films and compare them against their budgets it becomes clear that Russell started his directing career performing three miracles in a row. These are films defined by their grand ambitions and seemingly limitless imagination, all for relatively little money. The Mask (1994) was Jim Carrey's biggest box office hit in the biggest year of his career and competed for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars against films that were two to three times it's budget. It was good to be Chuck Russell. And then: Eraser (1996).

No one could call Eraser (1996) a disaster, but it was a troubled production, with constant script re-writes and great animosity between Russell and producer Arnold Kopelstein. It cost ten times as much as something like The Blob (1988) and most of the visual effects don't look half as good. Eraser (1996) was also, we can see in retrospect, the end of Arnold's career as a Hollywood mega-star. He followed it up with critical punching bag Batman & Robin (1997), then the truly disastrous Satanic action-horror flick End of Days (1999), and by the time he had a hit again in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) movies like The Matrix: Reloaded (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) made all his usual moves feel impossibly old-fashioned. Chuck Russell had hitched himself to the rocket-ship of one megastar's career only to immediately crash-land with another. There were four years between Eraser (1996) and his next film and when it finally arrived it was the universally-despised Bless the Child (2000).

Bless the Child (2000) is no one's passion project, an unholy chimera of post-Silence of the Lambs (1991) serial thriller, a The Omen (1976)-style religious horror film about a woman learning her foundling child is the second coming of Christ and the kind of CGI-showcase shocker that really came of age the previous year with films like The Haunting (1999) and The Mummy (1999). It was almost certainly this last aspect that lead the project to FX-veteran Chuck Russell's door, though only The Almighty knows why he would say yes. Russell had cut his teeth in the horror genre, sure, but Bless The Child (2000)'s turgid, saccharine screenplay couldn't be further from the joyous wit of his previous work. Perhaps Russell, the director who insisted that holy water and a crucifix were the only ways to beat Freddy Krueger, had genuine religious interest in the material. Sadly that interest didn't extend to engagement when behind the camera. The only person involved with Bless The Child (2000) who seems at all happy to be there is Ian Holm as an Heretical Exposition Clergyman, probably because he got paid well for a day's shooting where he got to stay seated and bellow incoherent religious nonsense. Heretical priests in horror movies will say anything. "Nowadays the concept of evil is politically incorrect!” No it isn't. That isn't true.

Bless the Child (2000) follows Maggie O'Connor (a stoic, frozen-faced Kim Basinger) as she raises Cody (Holliston Coleman), a special-needs child left in her care when the mother, Maggie's drug-addicted sister Jenna (Angela Bettis), can't stay clean. Cody exhibits all the signs of autism, at least as they were understood 25 years ago, but it turns out she's got something else going on her brain: she's Jesus. Or a saint? A demigod? Bless the Child (2000) never quite lands on a coherent religious doctrine for its story which finds Maggie trying to protect Cody from a Satanic cult who is seeking a child born under the star of Ya'akov (that's December 6th, 1993, for those of us who don't subscribe to Apocryphal Prophecy Weekly) foretold to bring about...good things? Foretold by whom? When? What is this child supposed to do exactly? No one seems to know but Satanic cults hate good things and love bad things so they know they need to find and kidnap this child, and either convert her to be the Antichrist or kill her. It's basically Vader's plan for Luke in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), except with a goon squad of The Omen (1976) rejects (Germanic eurotrash henchmen and creepy nannies) instead of Bossk and IG-88.

The Omen (1976) is not a masterpiece, a little too staid and respectable for its own good, but what fun it is comes from it's gleefully provocative story-of-Isaac set-up: what if the best way to serve God was to kill your kid? And what if Satan were capable of profane intervention? Bless the Child (2000) takes a lot from The Omen (1976) but flips every interesting part back to normal: the Antichrist is now just Christ, the intervention divine. The bad guys are serial killers of children, the good guys are cops and Maggie, who is so morally upstanding and nobly impoverished she might as well be Jesus herself. Nothing provocative there! And throughout the film's battle between good and evil God keeps putting His thumb on the scale by sending angels to intervene on the heroes' behalf to do everything from stopping a runaway car from falling off a bridge to resurrecting dead houseplants like they're ET. If you ever needed a horror movie to watch with your evangelical aunt, nothing in Bless the Child (2000) risks offense. Not only is God Not Dead here, God Is Not Silent, God is Goddamned Chatty.

If the power of Satan in these sorts of religious horror movies is to make us despair and cut us off from the beauty of God's love, than Bless the Child (2000)'s piety means it refuses any Satanic scares whatsoever. What exists in its place? CGI! For many horror fans in the year 2000 CGI was The Great Satan, making them despair that the genre was dead, cutting them off from the beauty of the kind of goopy practical effects that defined movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors (1987) and The Blob (1988). Between that and the perceived condescension of "hip" slashers like Scream (1996), this was an era where a lot of fans retreated into the past, rediscovering forgotten gems via burgeoning boutique home video labels like Image Entertainment and Anchor Bay. And who can blame them? The effects in Bless the Child (2000) are dire enough to turn anyone to a life of Bruno Matei. Early on we're treated to a nightmare sequence where Cody's room is flooded with a blurry, indistinct cartoon rats. Later at the end of the film that same foggy rat army floods into a church to form the shape of Satan sitting on His throne before immediately dispersing again. In both cases there's no tension, no suspense, not even a good story purpose for them to exist. It's just a camera pointed at an empty space, hoping against hope that the animators will do their jobs and make it exciting. But nothing in Bless the Child (2000) is exciting.

One of the biggest issues is the pace. 107 minutes is not an unreasonable runtime for a horror film or thriller, especially if it thinks it's a real movie like Bless the Child (2000), but we spend so much time watching the three movies it's trying to be slowly come together without a single one having any real sense of momentum. In one movie we have FBI Agent John Travis (Jimmy Smits, basically doing his role in NYPD Blue but sleepier), a religious scholar and former seminary student, making very little headway investigating a spate of child murders happening across NYC that he suspects may be occult related. You see, The New Dawn, the Satanic cult responsible, is unsure which child born under the star of Ya'akov is the Chosen One so they're just kidnapping every kid in the city born December 6th 1993. Presumably once they've killed those 400 kids they'll move onto the next major city? Fun fact: December 6th, 1993 is the birthdate of Elián González, another special child who was the center of a massive power struggle, but before you get too excited please keep in mind it is a matter of public record that he couldn't walk on water. 

In another movie we have the disability drama of Maggie and her custody battle to maintain guardianship over Cody when her sister Jenna returns, cleaned up, engaged to former-child-star-turned-charismatic-cult-leader Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell), and finally ready to be a mother. Eric's group The New Dawn has been helping teenage runaways and drug addicts across the country get back on their feet and when he met Maggie and learned about her daughter born on December 6th 1993 he fell head over heels in love and married her. Marriage seems like an unnecessary step, not part of any of the other previous kidnapping/murders, so maybe he's just like the rest of us and thinks Angela Bettis is really cute. In short time The New Dawn snatches Cody away from Maggie and she learns more of their evil plans from former cult member Cheri (Christina Ricci) who, in the only fun part of the movie, gets chased down, killed, and decapitated by her former compatriots for her troubles. Not that a woman being beaten to death on a subway platform is funny, necessarily, but the fact that The New Dawn takes the time to set her dead body up on a bench with her severed head perched atop her neck, just to give Maggie one last little scare? Hilarious!

Bless the Child (2000)'s third movie is the aforementioned CGI Spookshow Spectacular, with Maggie and Cody being constantly met with visions and miraculous occurrences. With a 65 million dollar budget Bless the Child (2000) cost way too much and it's almost certainly due to these ubiquitous special effects sequences that add nothing to the story. Beyond the aforementioned pixel-plague of rats there are gargoyles flying around whenever evil is afoot, votive candles that light themselves, evil nannies who turn into Gorgons, CGI spinning plates, self-shaking snowglobes (St. Elsewhere reference?) suicidal birds, and more crappy greenscreen than you can shake a stick at. Even in a pre-GenAI era where digital effects were expensive, slow and took a lot of humans working very hard the result was still sometimes a sludgy slop. To be clear, I'm not anti-CGI on principle and not even opposed to a lot of bad CGI from this era, which time has transformed from embarrassing to evocative: when the evil laundry machine turns into a Reboot-ass digital mess at the end of The Mangler (1995) I stand up and salute Tobe Hooper's commitment to ugliness in all it's forms. But Bless the Child (2000) is a dreary grey slog by any standard and its visuals couldn't be more rote and tame. Traditionally the whole point of horror is for the audience to experience vicarious transgressive thrills with the safety of knowing that they will be banished by the end credits but Russell, who consulted with the Catholic Archdiocese of New York on the script, is too scared to let anything get too Satanic, too naughty. The film's climax is a Satanic child sacrifice in an abandoned church and Russell wouldn't even let the set dressers put a pentagram anywhere. Instead we have a brief confrontation where Maggie and the NYPD S.W.A.T. team (with a vital assist from a distant church full of praying nuns offering the party a 30% buff to critical hits) shoot the bad guy in the head and Cody uses her Christ powers to heal a stray bullet wound Maggie picked up as angels fly overhead. Presumably they're there to bless the child because you gotta give the audience what they paid for.

Bless the Child (2000) is a movie of a very specific time, and not just because it simultaneously features people paying tuition over the internet and multiple plot-critical pay-phone scenes (in the year 2000 it was not uncommon for an America Online commercial to be followed by a 1-800-COLLECT commercial), but that doesn't mean audiences of the day went for it. It was greenlit chasing 1999 millennium panic that was a distant memory by the time it came out in August 2000 and was universally panned. I wouldn't think it'd take divine premonitions to know that you shouldn't spend 65 million dollars on Y2K meets Touched By An Angel meets Mercury Rising (1998), but that's why I'm not a Hollywood executive, I guess. Later it would even gain the distinction of being one of the 100 lowest rated films on Rotten Tomatoes but it's not one of the worst films of all-time; it simply isn't interesting enough to be. Chuck Russell would bounce back with the surprise hit The Scorpion King (2002), a film far more in his wheelhouse, but after that he more or less retired from filmmaking for a decade. Time will be kind to him, remembering the hits and sticking films like this (or the two DTV Travolta thrillers he'd later do, yech) down in a memory hole where they belong. 

Next on Silver Screams...Ginger Snaps (2000)