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.

Whilst I am beginning to develop a bit of a 'Dohler complex', in as much as I seem to be strangely drawn to a lot of the man's work and find much of it inexplicably appealing, The Galaxy Invader left me a little underwhelmed, sadly.

Whilst the creature design is atypically Dohler-esque (with more than a few 'Creature from the Black Lagoon' visual traits thrown in), drunken rednecks steal the bulk of the camera time this time around leaving the creature a little side-lined.

The focus on the hillbilly capering and bungling as they attempt to hunt down and capture the alien - who has landed in the woods near their ramshackle town - and exploit it for monetary gain whilst mildly entertaining in some respects, does become tiresome.

However, whilst ineptitude dominates throughout, it's almost impossible (well, at least for me) not to get some enjoyment out of this cheesy little schlock-fest.

Originally posted here: https://www.cult-labs.com/forums/423152-post371.html

The kid in House by the Cemetery is annoying full stop. ;)

At least one Nosferatu knows of what he talks. :nod: ;) :skull:

You're right, I think I had a temporary brain fart! The original title is Una sull'altra, but it's also known as Perversion Story and One On Top of Another. Beatrice Cenci (aka The Conspiracy of Torture) is a historical drama.

Yes, whatever the language, Bob is still an annoying little twat. :axekiller:

It's easy to get mixed up with the obscure titles that hardly ever get decent releases Nos.:nod:

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MAMA - I held off from seeing this for a while - I don't know why really, I suppose I had the idea in the back of my mind that a lot of genre fans had written it off as half baked. Anyway, I picked up a cheap copy from Cex the other day and gave it a half-hearted spin, fully anticipating a trudge into boredom. I didn't expect to find such a captivating film. I really liked 'Mama', which is basically a tale of maternal angst set within the confines of the post-Insidious latter day haunting subgenre. At its heart are two semi-feral children and their relationship with an otherworldly entity, a dynamic which gets complicated after the woodland-dwelling kids' rehabilitation and the arrival of a punk-rock surrogate mother... this all builds up to a climax which would've been heart wrenching had it not tipped over into slight tweeness in certain respects. 'Mama' has its flaws, but it really works in many ways - the pacing, the atmosphere, even the CGI which many have dissed, are all pretty much spot on, and, despite the presence of many of the standard moves that I guess come with the contemporary ghost movie package, there was something original about where it took its ideas about motherhood and attachment. I liked the omnipresence of moths and twisted, cocoon like forms - something about these and the (sometimes) foreboding atmosphere reminded me of Ramsey Campbell's fiction a little. All in all a great little film in my opinion and one that I highly recommend.