The Night Child (1975)
Massimo Dallamano was Sergio Leone's cinematographer on A Fistfull of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, so he clearly knows how to photograph and frame a movie and he shows this with The Night Child. It's beautifully photographed and a real visual feast.
Unfortunately beautiful photography alone isn't enough to sustain a whole film and The Night Child fails due to it's story and writing which when combined make the film desperately dull to the point of being boring. Dallamano doesn't seem to know how to create tension or build up and wastes his two lead actors. Stars Richard Johnson and Joanna Cassidy sleep their way through proceedings as the script never allows them to get a grip on their roles and sweep the viewer away in anything approaching believability. Italian child star Nicoletta Elmi plays the girl under demonic possession in the film but i became fed up with the close ups of her snouty nostrils and the endless hysterical pitch to her voice in the English dub track.
The soundtrack was another annoying aspect to the film. There is an Italian dubbed soundtrack with subtitles which would be fine except everyone is speaking English anyway, so you go with the English soundtrack which has the actors own voices but that too is also a dub, so none of the language selections are what you would call ideal. It's always a pet hate about Italian movies why they always have to over dub everything.
A special mention must go to Arrow whose dvd when upscaled looks stunning and really allows Dallamano's photography to shine.
As far as Exorcist rip offs go The Night Child is one of the worst i've seen.
|