Is it a phenomenon associated with millenialism? Or has there always been this much interest, in the films, in the dark side of the supernatural? We’ve had, in the last couple of years, The Devil’s Advocate, The Ninth Gate, Arnie’s bow to Hell in End of Days, and now Bless the Child, with a new cut of The Exorcist coming out in a couple of months.

In my local paper, Bless the Child got a fairly bad review (grade D), with the reviewer sarcastically mining the film for suggestions as to what to do if unusual things happen to you (e.g., if the Star of Bethlehem should appear over your house some December). Actually, it’s not all that bad a film, though it certainly won’t win any Oscars.

Apparently the Star of Bethlehem did appear, at least over New York, ⁽¹⁾ in 1993, though I don’t remember seeing anything about that interesting astronomical phenomenon in the press at the time; and a few days later, drugged-out hooker Jenna O’Connor (Angela Bettis) appeared at her sister Maggie’s (Kim Basinger) front door and left her holding the bag — actually, a nine-day-old baby girl named Cody who is already, at this very early age, apparently showing signs of something like, but not the same as, autism.

Cut to spring of the year 2000, when Cody, now played quite well by seven-year-old Holliston Coleman, is a pupil in a Catholic school specializing in “special children” and demonstrating (by making things spin without touching them, and by bringing dead pigeons back to life) that she really is something “special”, and may in fact be the bimillenial equivalent of Jesus. Reenter Jenna, now married to Eric Stark (very realistically played by Rufus Sewell), director of a Scientology-like cult which may just have something a lot darker behind it. Stark and Jenna “reposess” Jenna’s daughter by the simple expedient of kidnapping her, and Maggie goes to the police, where she is fortuitously thrown into the company of John Travis (Jimmy Smits), an FBI agent and sometime Catholic seminary student who is in town to help find the cult murderer of six small children — all of them born, probably not by sheer chance, on the same day as Jenna; the name of the Biblical King Herod is mentioned in this regard. It becomes evident, with Easter fast approaching, that Cody is the fulcrum in a major struggle between the forces of God and those of Satan.

Except for some rather good special effects (the Prince of Darkness shows up for a moment in one well-done scene; his minions, the non-human kind, are somewhat more liberally represented), the movie is largely underplayed. The feeling you are given is that it is not the fate of the world but the fate of the characters in the film that rests on whether Stark can or cannot “turn” Cody. Stark’s evil is not that of a Gilles de Rais, but the more trivial and insidious evil of a used-car salesman who will unload a deathtrap on you to turn a quick buck for himself — the sort of man who would sell his soul for a shot of Viagra, and to Hell — quite literally — with anybody else. Jenna herself is more passively evil, and for that reason she is ultimately salvageable. Cody’s stubborn Goodness deserves the viewer’s attention. And, of course, from time to time the film hammers home the message that those who fight for the right cause are never alone in the battle (there are three scenes that involve angels coming to the spiritual or physical aid of one or another of the main characters — not counting the climactic scene).

All in all, kind of a fun film, and IMHO a cut above most of the Satanic films that have been coming out in the past few years.

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⁽¹⁾ When I think about it, all the films in this genre that I can remember seeing seem to have taken place in New York. Howcum Denver or Sacramento never suffer from Satanic visitations???