The Godsend

A young British family with three kids and a baby meet a creepy pregnant woman in the park. For some reason they allow the obviously oddball preggers dame (ANGELA PLEASENCE, DONALD's DAUGHTER!!!) to follow them home. Once there she secretly destroys their phone and goes into labor. The next morning they discover the new mother has split the scene like a frat house one night stand and didn't even bother to take her newborn with her. The family adopts and raises the baby as their own, and the child systematically kills all her siblings in order to get the full attention of the parents. Sounds pretty good huh? Well, it's not. THE GODSEND has got to be one of the feeblest horror flicks ever made and chronically prunes away any and every possibility for a scare. If you were ever insane enough to fantasize about a G-rated thriller starring Mattel's discontinued line of "Sunshine Family" dolls, where all the kills occur off screen and where most of the action takes place in gauzily filmed parks where birds chirp non-stop, then your dream and my nightmare has come true. Maybe they were going for a PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK meets SAVANNAH SMILES vibe or something. Whatever the intention was, the outcome, though watchable, is an exercise in cinematic passivity. Tons of interesting themes about sibling rivalry, preferential treatment, mixed families and, most especially, maternal mourning linger on the outskirts but are never allowed entry into this film. I could go along with the absence of blood if there was at least some attempt to delve into anything remotely unpleasant. This is like an Ivory soap commercial where every once in a while someone gets up and walks off screen and you're told later that they died mysteriously. The little girl who plays the menace (at her oldest) WILHELMINA GREEN, is suitably Nazi-esque and evil looking, but 10,000 close ups of her staring into space like an inbred Persian cat provides little in the chill department. There is a climactic kill near the end involving somebody being pushed out a window but, trust me, it's too little too late. At some point I realized that there was no kill aggressive enough to save what I had already witnessed and began praying for a nuclear bomb to drop instead. From what I've heard, the book THE GODSEND by BERNARD TAYLOR is actually a good read and delves much further into the psychological ramifications of witnessing your entire family wiped out in front of your eyes by some kid who got dumped in your lap. Hopefully, unlike the movie, it's also brave enough to get its hands a little dirty.