Children of the Mist (1993 TV Movie)
1/10
Excruciating
2 December 2013
God, this is bad. Excruciatingly so. A vapid ghost story about a bereaved father who visits a medium in an effort to get back in touch with his ghostly daughter who was killed in a car wreck, it's as maudlin and mawkish as it sounds, descending into sheer sentimentality long before the end and becoming vomit-inducing with it.

The film has an ultra-cheap look to it which is no surprise given it's a TV movie from the 1990s (the cameras they shot with back then look awful to modern viewers). Everything about it is dated, from the clothes to the characters, even more so than various movies from the 1980s or even 1970s. The script is strictly cringe-worthy and the attempts to deal with the afterlife are just laughable, like the bit with all the costumed kids playing in the garden.

Another surprise is just how bad the cast are. Patrick Bergin had made a pretty good villain in SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, but his acting is stilted and wooden in the extreme. In some scenes he's still acting like a psycho rather than a grieving father which I'm sure wasn't the effect they wanted. What Vanessa Redgrave is doing here is anyone's guess, but it proves that every actor has one or two skeletons in his/her closet. Everyone else is equally terrible, particularly those obnoxious child actors.
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