YMMV / Bless the Child

• Adaptation Displacement: Very few are aware of the book.
• Anvilicious: (in the film) Catholicism is good, Atheism is bad, and Satanism is worse.
• Complete Monster: Eric Stark is a Satanist and cult leader who is trying to find a "special" empowered child by kidnapping kids born on a certain time of a certain day as a prophecy foretells, testing them for powers and murdering them when they fail. In public, Stark's status as the leader of a self-help quasi-religious group keeps him from drawing scrutiny. When he kidnaps his new wife's daughter Cody from her aunt Mim, Stark believes he has found the child he needs and proceeds to try to break her faith in goodness, while encouraging her to burn a homeless man alive. When Cody refuses, Stark burns the man himself out of spite. Stark and his men kill other people during the film and when Cody and Mim are reunited, Stark furiously attempts to gun both down rather than surrender his hold on Cody.
• Narm:
  • The incredibly fake CGI demons.
  • The Satanists's lair touches all the religion's stereotypes: punk youngsters, bloody Goths, cloaked henchmen, ectstatic partygoers, human bones everywhere, and a vandalized, inverted Christ statue. It only lacks a Black Metal band playing in the background to be completely impossible to take seriously.
  • Basinger's incredibly high-pitched screams when she finds the body of Christina Ricci's character.
• One-Scene Wonder: Peter Mensah as an amusingly cliché and possibly literal Almighty Janitor.

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