The Child (Robert Voskanian, 1977)

Robert Voskanian and Robert Dadashian, two Armenian-American film students in Los Angeles, were obsessed with Night of the Living Dead and decided to make their own low-budget, independent horror movie in the oilfields outside the city. Voskanian directed, Dadashian produced, both men edited, and their parents catered, with most of the cast and crew also taking on additional jobs. Lead actress Laurel Barnett doubled as the costume designer, with her thrift store finds clothing every cast member (she's in a different groovy thrift store dress in almost every scene), and screenwriter Ralph Lucas played one of the ghouls and was also the dialogue coach (not sure what that entailed). Michael Quatro, older brother of Suzi and uncle of Sherilyn Fenn, composed the far-out Polymoog synth score.

Voskanian and Dadashian and their mostly inexperienced cast and crew came up with The Child, a truly oddball surrealist nightmare delivered with talent, amateurishness, real vision, and a little incompetence. If these guys were better filmmakers or worse ones, this movie wouldn't be so damn interesting. They hit that sweet spot between lack of experience and surplus of imagination that leads to so much delightful weirdness. And novice cinematographer Mori Alavi (this is his only film credit) captures some genuinely beautiful and unsettling images and is great with shadows and light.

The Child takes familiar elements (zombies, a telekinetic child, the house in the woods occupied by a strange family, the protagonist who used to live in the area returning to find that things are not as they seem) and rearranges them in bizarre and exciting configurations while the actors deliver the goods in a space where "good" and "bad" have no meaning. Yes, this is my kind of shit. 

The Child begins, after an opening scene I won't spoil, with Alicianne Del Mar (Barnett) serenely driving down country roads. The car moves strangely, as if in a dream, and Alicianne soon drives into a ditch and gets stuck in gravel. She wanders through some ominous-looking woods and stumbles into an old woman, Mrs. Whitfield (Ruth Ballan), and her dog. Mrs. Whitfield invites her in for tea, and they have an extremely odd conversation about the woods, how Alicianne loves the woods and used to live in the area until her parents died, and how Mrs. Whitfield doesn't much care for her neighbors, the Nordon family, which is a little awkward because Alicianne has been hired by the Nordons to take care of the youngest member of the family, Rosalie (Rosalie Cole). 

After her cup of tea, Alicianne decides to wander through the creepy woods at night until she arrives at the home of her employer. Old Man Nordon (Frank Janson) gives her the business about being late, asks her if she's a nervous woman, says he doesn't like nervous women, and then heads up the imposing staircase mumbling about all the work he has to do. Adult son Len (Richard Hanners) stares strangely at Alicianne and apologizes for his family's weirdness. Len seems like a creepy weirdo in this scene, but he shakes it off and starts acting like a relatively normal dude in subsequent scenes. Turns out, he's been living in the woods with his nutty dad and nutty little sister next to a cemetery full of ghouls for too long and was just struck dumb by seeing an attractive woman his own age. He's the only member of the family who's not a creepy weirdo, though I did laugh quite a bit when he offers Alicianne some hard cider made by his buddy Tom with the following warning: "Be careful. It's very hard."

The youngest Nordon, Rosalie, is a strange child, though understandably so. Her mother was killed in the woods by "tramps" and her dad is a curmudgeonly grouch who only laughs when remembering the story of a troop of Boy Scouts who died from accidentally ingesting oleander. Less understandably, Rosalie likes to hang out in the cemetery at night with a pack of murderous zombies. When she's not hangin' with undead ghouls, she draws creepy pictures of them and laughs it up with her dad about dead Boy Scouts. Rosalie also has a bad habit of sending her zombie pals out for revenge when she feels she's been wronged. Alicianne is in for a wild ride with this Nordon bunch.

The whole movie has a strange, dreamy feel, with choppy edits, odd framing and camera angles, stilted or awkward delivery of dialogue, and narrative inconsistencies existing alongside gorgeous images, cohesive narrative moments, and naturalistic acting. Some of it makes sense, some of it doesn't, some of it looks professional and carefully composed, some of it looks amateurish and accidental. It's a curious, intriguing blend that I happen to like a lot. The zombies have a great look, too, with makeup, design, and physical movements that don't remind me much of other movie zombies. My only real complaint is that the character of Alicianne turns into a stereotypical hysterical, screaming damsel in distress in the big concluding scene, but for the most part, The Child is a unique bit of '70s cult weirdness.