Father Justin O’Carroll (Anthony John Denison) takes over the duties of a recently injured priest, Father Rosetti (Paxton Whitehead), in an investigation into two virgin pregnancies. Joined by Sister Anne (Sela Ward), Father O’Carroll must determine if the two fifteen-year-olds (Sydney Penny, Kristin Dattilo) are truly virgins, and if so, which is carrying the child of God, and which is carrying the child of Satan.
Child of Darkness, Child of Light offers up the apocalypse, but isn’t much interested in it. Instead, it focuses on how claiming to be a pregnant virgin can be tough on a teenage girl at school. I suppose this could be interesting (though I tend to doubt it) if examined from the point of view of the girls. But except for a few scenes of cruelty, we see the girls’ plight via the priest. Emotional pain filtered through an uninvolved third party doesn’t have a lot of kick, particularly when that party is played as stiffly as Father O’Carroll.
Of the whole fire and brimstone and ultimate powers bit, we get crows. They must be very scary crows since people keep screaming when they show up. I might be a bit freaked if I found one in my room, but watching a few black birds on film doesn’t raise any goose bumps on me (unless Hitchcock is directing). Something, anything, of a supernatural nature would have raised the stakes. Sure, a low budget means nothing is going to be too spectacular, but crows just don’t do the trick.
The film presents a mystery: which baby will be Satan’s and which will be God’s, but doesn’t give us any way within the story to solve it. Still, I knew who was pregnant with the antichrist long before the end (since the filmmakers obviously wanted me to believe it was a specific girl, I knew it was the other). The problem with this mystery is it doesn’t matter which is which, dramatically. It changes nothing in the story.
In order to keep the great “secret,” both girls are treated the same for the first two thirds of the film. They have the same kind of home (with supportive parents), are equally mistreated at school, and have a teen claiming to be the father. And both are given the same amount of screen time. So first we have to follow the priest investigating one girl, and then watch as he does it all over again with the other, finding precisely the same things. It isn’t exciting once.
Sela Ward plays the understanding Sister Anne. She’s one of those really hot nuns we all see…well, only in the movies. She even ends up naked (no, you don’t get to see anything, only other characters do), because that’s what happens to hot nuns in movies.
Things pick up at the end with twists that clear up some points while making quite a few characters’ actions absurd. But I was up for anything that put some energy into the film.
Feeling like a bargain basement version of The Omen, Child of Darkness, Child of Light is too low on emotion, suspense, and frights to be of much interest. The last twenty minutes make the film just tolerable.