13th Child (2002)

Very disappointing...

Sadly Over-hyped

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

13th Child starts in New Jersey as detective Katherine Tatum (Michelle Maryk) meets District Attorney Murphy (Lesley-Anne Down) who tells her about an ex-cop named Riley (Robert Guillaume) who is now locked away in the New Jersey Mental Institution. Murphy tells Katherine that Riley was her father's partner & her father was found horribly mutilated in the Southern New Jersey Pine Barrens forest, Riley blames the legendary creature the Jersey Devil & Murphy explains that she wants Katherine to go to Pine Barrens & investigate the recent death of an escaped convict also found horribly mutilated & maybe also discover the truth of what happened to her father. Katherine drives down there & at the murder scene finds what looks like an animal claw which seems to support the Jersey Devil theory & as the evidence mounts Katherine herself is targeted by the creature...Directed by Thomas Ashley & Steven Stockage this painfully slow horror film based on a native American legend has nothing going for it, in fact at the one hour & twenty minute mark when the cop Ron says 'this stops here, this stops now' I was praying the same thing but in a slightly different context. The number thirteen really is unlucky when it comes to this film & anyone foolish enough to spend good money on renting or buying it, the whole film just sucks really. For a start the script is painfully slow, at one hour & forty minutes long 13th Child felt like it went on forever & I was seriously bored. The narrative is poor, it goes back & forth between days & jumps between the detectives at work & some guy in a mental hospital who has some Indian bones & can hear voices. The basic premise of a big city cop investigating a local supernatural legend in some small backwoods town feels a lot like an episode of the X-Files (1993-2002) but the main authority figure Katherine is given no stance or beliefs at all one way or the other, we never know if she believes in the Jersey Devil, whether she flatly refuses to believe or if she has an open mind to start with & Katherine is just sketched as someone with no real opinions. There's no investigation as such, Katherine finds a couple of claws & that's as much as she does & that's as much as it takes to convince her. The mystery surrounding the monster is none existent & the script gives it no background or plausible origins at all, it just relies on the not very interesting native American legend stance which I find very tiresome & no real reason for anything at all.The only thing that 13th Child has going for it is a fairly decent looking monster at the end even if it does answer to the name of Bruno(!), it looks like a cross between an Alien from Alien (1979) & Darkness from Legend (1985) although according to the script it's a cross between a Spider, a Bat, a Human & Goat. Thre's a bit of gore, a dead Deer prop gets used several times, there are a couple of headless bodies & a bit of blood. There's also one scene of nudity that has nothing to do with anything else. Set mainly in the woods 13th Child has a natural yet bland brown & orange colour scheme, most of the film is shot with tight angles to try & hide the lack of budget but there's no getting away from it. There's a lot of random shots of a Spider crawling along that got on my nerves after a while.Actually filmed in New Jeresey the locations look authentic enough & despite a low budget look it's reasonably well made for what it is. The acting is alright at best, Oscar winner Cliff Robertson probably needed the money, Lesley-Anne Down only has a small cameo while writer Michael Maryk (any relation to leading lady Michelle Maryk I wonder?) has a small cameo too.13th Child is a rubbish horror film that tries to have supernatural overtones but it's all so boring & bland & exceedingly slow, a half decent monster & one or two gory bits can't come close to saving this one hour & forty minute bore.

I bought this DVD at wal-mart for $5 and admit I wasn't expecting much. I tried watching it once and made it maybe ten minutes before giving up...I made it this time and it wasn't too bad.The legend of the Jersey Devil has been around a long time and is a well known legend in those parts. There are many myths about what it is exactly and one of those myths is that it's a shape shifting native American that was the 13th child of a tribe chief killed by British soldiers. This movie tells a fictitious version of that. A lady is sent to investigate after more bodies mysteriously are found mutilated in the woods in Jersey. All leads point to a mysterious hermit in the woods played By Cliff Robertson.The director here is a nobody, but he has several shots that I enjoyed. This movie has a real 80's horror movie feel to it. He often changes camera angles and focuses hard to get the shots just right and from the right perspective. Sad that he has done nothing else. I will admit though I hated the opening scenes with the sloppy fast camera work symbolizing the running of the actor, I am a firm believer in letting the actor work and do the action and not letting the camera do the action to cut corners for lack of a location to shoot your scenes in. The director needs to become a character with his beautiful shots, but never ever interfere with the actors.Acting wise it was full of used up nobodies from old 80's TV fame. Cliff Robertson co-wrote and stared, and he did okay. Robertson is a good actor, and he's still getting successful roles to this day. The lead actress was boring and playing that cliché cop role females always portray. We had the token black guy and Chris Atkins playing a part that was as dull as anything he's ever done, would we expect anything else though. Robert Guillaume will always be Benson to me as I grew up on that show, but here he did a great job as Riley.The movie had a decent start and I was interested, it had some cool kills and I wanted to know where it was going, until it got there. I was let down after a good build up. The Devil itself could've been cool but it really looked so plastic-like and fake that it was laughable. The plot gets confusing at times, and you see many plot holes, but hey it was worth a watch if you had nothing better going on I guess. I struggled between 2 and 3 stars, but ultimately decided it didn't earn that 3rd star.

Started out with some promise with documentary style of the Curse of the 13th Child and/or the Jersey Devil, but after that starting with the pot smoking hunter it reminded me of a 1974 style , made for TV monster movie. A lot of blurry images of the monster and a camera man's eye view of the victims. This stinker had absolutely nothing to do with the Jersey Devil or the 13th Child (whatever that is). The low budget Devil's choppers had one look to it. A close-up, corn syrup sticking , hard plastic stiff, opening of the jaws. Cheap. The only decent part of this bomb was Cliff Robertson aka Mr. Shroud. He did look like Bela Lugosi in White Zombie. I think Cliff was just having some fun and had the high powered friends to get this onto the shelves and get a writer's credit.

This movie gives the impression it was made by a child it is so bad. The story is nonsense, the acting amateur, the direction pathetic, the script atrocious, and quite frankly it merits a 1 out of 10 and that is being generous. Someone from the Attorney-Generals Office is sent to investigate a murder in woods where a devil is meant to reside blah blah blah..... We have sub plot upon ludicrous sub-plot with a failed effort to make the film look like something out of Blair Witch with bits of Alien, plus trashy gobbledegook thrown in..... total rubbish.