See also:

Apocalypse
Satan's Children

by Deeky Wentworth

There are a lot of reasons a movie ends up being a being a piece of crap. An incompetent director, for example, can sink a film. A talentless cast of actors will do the same. A sloppy, incoherent script is a proverbial albatross, as no amount of acting, direction, scoring or dance numbers can overcome a clunky story. Of course, there are times when all these elements come together in some sort of perfect storm of filmmaking and a movie of unimaginable suckitude is loosed upon the world. (I’m looking at you, Troll 2.)

But perhaps the worst reason for a film being utter crap is laziness. Clearly, that’s what happened here.

This is typified by a bit of dialogue late in the film: An agent with the Ritual Homicide and Occult Related Crime Division™ of the FBI looking at some voodoo scribbled in the dirt notes "That's a Druid rune spell straight out of the sixteenth century." What? No. There you have three bits of incompatible information in one sentence that even the most basic of research would have uncovered.

Crap dialogue aside, the performances here are wooden and uninspired from the top down. I wonder if everyone involved here was working on this film as a court-imposed community service. It all seems so half-assed, as if those involved are here because they have to be, not because they want to be.

“Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.”

Jimmy Smits stars as New York cop, making a big stretch as an actor here. Kim Basinger attempts to have her Oscar revoked, taunting the Academy by playing a not-very-bright doctor and guardian to the second coming of baby Jesus (who just happens to be a girl this time around), failing to convince as either a doctor or mother-figure. And odder still, Ian Holm shows up briefly to deliver dialogue from The Usual Suspects while rolling around in a wheelchair.

And then there’s Rufus Sewell as former child actor turned self-help guru/Satan’s minion. Part Deepak Chopra, part Aleister Crowley, he heads a Scientology-like cult called The New Dawn. I guess calling it Golden Dawn would have been too obvious. Not that this film is subtle about anything, the New Dawn still manages to use pyramid iconography so prevalent among the tenants of Thelema. His performance is, sadly, not very good. In his attempts to be simultaneously suave and evil, charming and satanic, he fails completely and just comes across as an overacting doofus.

The story itself is a poorly assembled amalgam of other, mostly better films. Obviously, the film owes much to The Omen, The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, but also makes odd nods to The Empire Strikes Back and latter day Satan-fests like Stigmata. It’s a film that has no ideas of its own, and can’t even be bothered to throw some new polish in those it’s borrowed.

A few days before Christmas a child is born as a mysterious star appears in the sky. This star hasn’t been seen in a couple thousand years, and wise folks, particularly elderly black women on the bus, portend this is the sign someone special has just arrived. Soon after, Maggie O'Connor’s long lost junkie sister arrives at her door, newborn under her arm. Not realizing she’s in a ham-fisted movie, Maggie (Kim Basinger) is unable to put two and two together, and never realizes the young girl is more than just your ordinary crack baby. Maggie’s sister disappears moments later, leaving her daughter in her sister’s care.

“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.”

Six years later, the girl, Cody, isn’t quite normal. She appears autistic, or, as my mother might say, touched by the hand of God. She can re-animate dead animals, cure cancer and spin dinner plates with her mind, but she doesn’t seem capable of doing much else aside from driving Maggie’s dates away by pounding her head into the wall. How this is going to help her become a prophet or savior or whatever it is, ain’t exactly clear.

Nonetheless, Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell) wants her. His plan is to turn her evil, make her some sort of Antichrist. Failing that, he’ll kill her. He and his henchmen have already snatched up six kids all born on the same day and killed them, just to be sure. Stark arrives at Maggie’s house with her sister in tow, now all clean and sober and recently married.

Stark and his wife abduct the girl and it’s up to Maggie to save her. She enlists the help of Agent Travis (Jimmy Smits), from the Ritual Homicide squad to help. Now, it’s anyone’s guess how this will end. Will the cute girl turn evil and plunge the world into darkness? Or will she remain good and true and save us all? Will Travis shoot Stark to death? Take a guess.

What I will tell you is that there are some profoundly ridiculous moments in this movie. Cars explode for no reason, angels appear as janitors, a man has knitting needles jabbed in his eyes, and Christina Ricci is attacked by demons, beheaded, and then disappears. Mercifully, her time on screen is short. Kim Basinger doesn’t fare as well, as much of the movie must be propped up by her performance, and she clearly doesn’t seem to care.

And if she doesn’t care, how is the audience supposed to?