Johan_Wondering_on_Waves Review of The Godsend

The Godsend (1980)

Not as good as The Bad Seed but still very enjoyable

[7/10 · 27 January 2015]

Reading its premise it reminded me immediately of an old favorite of mine "The Bad Seed" and to a minor extent "Bloody Birthday". These movies all have one thing in common, all of them are a devilish child (in Bloody Birthday it's even 3 kids)lacking some kind of conscience and who get a thrill out of killing people. They even get away with those crimes in the beginning, fooling people who are wondering how that could have happened. At some point someone close to them gets suspicious. The motives however are in each case different. Rhoda from The Bad Seed was pretty materialistic. If she thought she deserved or wanted something (being it a prize, an object) she just took it and resorted to killing the person trying to deny it to her. The 3 kids from Bloody Birthday really didn't have a clear motive they just seemed to do it because they could even though people trying to stand in their way were more likely to be victimized. And last but not least there is Godsend Bonnie with angelic blonde hair and face, born from a mysterious woman who disappeared the next morning after giving birth in a home of a household of a couple with 4 children. The couple decides to raise Bonnie as one of their own. Bonnie is still only a baby when she commits her first murder. She doesn't kill for fun nor for material things, but weird enough for love. She wants the love of her parents for her alone. And she tries to get rid of those who she has to share the attention with, being her stepbrothers and sister. The good thing is all her killings are clever and mysterious since all but the last happen of screen. Of course with each loss the parents gets more and more depressed, the mother the most. The father on the other hand tries to find out how it happened and gets really suspicious of Bonnie when a third kid dies. The mother refuses to think bad of her little angel and more and more conflicts happen between the parents something Bonnie handily takes advantage of. The ending is quite open which might be cliché for these type of movies but I like it. Trying to break such a circle won't make it stop as there is a big chance such a circle can begin out of nothing somewhere else again. No matter how much we try there will always be evil to deal with.