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(1980)
Director: Gabrielle Beaumont
It was around 1982 to 1983 that Menahem Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus really captured the attention of not just the American audience, but the world audience. More specifically, it wasn't the men themselves, but the films they were producing in their studio, Cannon Films. The '80s were a record time for investment in American independent film production, and the Go-Go boys had seized the opportunity from the get-go. Thanks to all that available money, as well as getting major studio MGM to sign an agreement with them so they would better distribute much of their product stateside, in those particular two years they had box office success around the world with movies such as The Last American Virgin, Hercules, and Revenge Of The Ninja. Times then were rosy for Cannon; in fact, if the Go-Go boys from that point on decided to slowly grow bigger from their then success instead of overextending themselves, there is a good chance Cannon might still be around today. (But that's another story.) Anyway, what many people who enjoy or are familiar with Cannon films like myself (a pizza, beer, and a cheesy Cannon movie will give this Cannonholic a perfect Friday night) forget or simply don't know is that the Go-Go boys were active in producing (and with Golan sometimes even directing and/or writing) movies long before that particular period. Their trek to the shores of Hollywood was a
long one, really began in the late '60s when
they were still in their native Israel. First
they started creating movies exclusively for
their local market, which were eagerly embraced
by an audience hungry for movies about
themselves and their stories. Of course, the
profits from these productions enabled them to
make more right into the '70s. Most of these
remain obscure outside of Israel even today, but
they managed to start selling some of these
overseas (including the Lemon Popsicle
series and Operation Thunderbolt)
to even greater profits.
With even more cash in hand, they started to
dabble in the more
Well, why not? The drive-ins and the grindhouses were still alive and raking in cash at that time, so in 1980 they released, chiefly to those two particular markets, their first personally-produced Hollywood movies. Of course, one of those first movies released was The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, no doubt made to ensure audiences the Cannon tradition was continuing. You might have heard of that movie, as well as their legendary disco musical The Apple. But... do you know of their other movies of that year? Schizoid? Seed Of Innocence? Dr. Heckyl & Mr. Hype? Probably not. There was one additional Cannon movie released that year, though it's not the one being reviewed for The Unknown Movies' contribution to the Golan-Globus roundtable. Just kidding - that sixth movie was indeed The Godsend. It actually seems to have been intended from the start to be more mainstream than the other Cannon movies of that year. For one thing, it was an adaptation of a respected novel (written by Bernard Taylor, whose later novel Mother's Boys was also turned into a movie.) Also, it was given some money for its budget, evident from the first few minutes of English scenery shot from helicopters that plays under the opening credits. Though not long after the credits end, it's clear that we are watching yet another movie "inspired" by The Omen - so even this film couldn't totally escape from all of Golan and Globus' trademark touches - namely, jumping onto a tiring or utterly dead trend. In fairness, although The Godsend
may be inspired by The Omen,
it does at the very least set up the situation
in an intriguing manner. The camera immediately
swoops down after the conclusion of the opening
credits to introduce us to the Marlowe family,
consisting of patriarch Alan (Stoddard - who?),
matriarch Kate (Hayman - who?), and their four
children, one of them just a few months old.
Engaged in a hike across the English
countryside, on their way home Kate spots a
mysterious pregnant woman (Angela Pleasence,
daughter of Donald.) She befriends this unnamed
woman, and
Now if this was the real world, no doubt the baby would immediately get taken by the child welfare authorities, and subsequently be placed with foster parents (who had been already assessed and registered by the authorities) for a brief period before being given to an adoptive parent or parents who had already spent time being assessed and placed on a waiting list. But since this is a movie, and only ten minutes or so have passed, Kate and Alan not only get to keep the baby for the moment, but are able to get in line and jump ahead so that in short time they are now the legal parents of this infant, who they name Bonnie. And just in time, as it turns out. Shortly after being given custody of Bonnie, their original infant dies, for reasons never revealed, in the crib it was sharing with Bonnie (cheap bastards!) Oh well, they seem to more or less think, at least we can start fresh with this new baby! (Unfeeling bastards!) But as the years pass and Bonnie gets older, more misfortunes befall on the Marlow family. One son mysteriously drowns in a river during a family picnic. Another son mysteriously dies after falling in a barn. In both cases, there is irrefutable evidence that Bonnie was around the two boys during their deaths, but neither Alan nor Kate see anything suspicious. Alan only starts suspecting something may be up when the string of tragedy turns more personal - that is, when he sees evidence that Bonnie made him sterile(!) I will admit that there was something about
that last-mentioned sequence that gave me the
shivers and made me curl up into a ball while I
was seated in my La-Z-Boy, despite there also
being a good measure of utter ludicrousness to
be found in that same scene. Aside from that
moment, however, there is really nothing
frightening or even creepy to be found in
The Godsend. One immediate stumbling
block is that there is none of the content one
usually associates with this kind of horror - or
with Golan and Globus, for that matter. There
are only a few drops of blood, and
Of course, a movie doesn't necessarily need such exploitive material to be frightening; for example, The Other managed to be disturbing and chilling despite its PG rating. Though if you want to try and scare your audience more by the power of suggestion than with blood and guts, you have to work hard at tapping into what people in general consider to be either scary or disturbing. For example, I think most people would agree that seeing a child get murdered would be very disturbing to witness, even if the context is a fiction film. I am also confident that these same people would also agree that seeing a child as a murderer in any situation would be equally uncomfortable to witness. So considering the subject matter of The Godsend, it seems reasonable that if the movie chooses to avoid using any blatant kind of exploitation, that it would instead try to shake its audience by portraying multiple examples of those two uncomfortable scenarios. But as I already mentioned, the movie stubbornly refuses to show this. Until near the end, the murder sequences are never seen, and the lone exception is so incompetently filmed that it's laughable, especially in one particular shot when a really obvious mannequin is used for substitution. Naturally, since the murder scenes are never shown, we don't get to see Bonnie committing the deadly deed. (Come on, isn't it obvious she is guilty?) Often in a movie, one way to understand the character of a murderer is by seeing them "in action", so one of the keys to possibly understanding Bonnie is lost as a result. But even when you look elsewhere in the movie, there is very little that not only makes Bonnie horrific, but a character. One thing most viewers won't be able to ignore before the movie is even half over is the surprising amount of time she is off-screen. When she does appear, she has little to no dialogue, actually speaking for the very first time around the half hour mark. The little that she does say never at any time sounds like what an ordinary little girl would say to her parents, or that of an especially malevolent person, child or adult. The two girls cast to play Bonnie (only one of which has an additional acting credit apart from this movie) at different points of time are cute enough, and are able to give a good glower when the camera gets close to their face at key moments, but I can't really judge their performances because of those previously mentioned limiting circumstances. As for the rest of the cast, well, let's just say after watching Hayman, Stoddard, and Barr performing, the reason why they are not known (at least on these shores) become really clear. The only member of the cast who managed to catch my attention was Angela Pleasence. Though she is only in the movie for a few minutes and doesn't have a lot of dialogue, her vacant stares and mysterious-sounding voice actually make her character both haunting and intriguing, enough so that you soon wish the movie was about her instead. The blame for the almost complete failure of
The Godsend actually shouldn't
fall on
But the biggest problem with Beaumont's direction isn't that she couldn't make the movie look good, but that she has no sense of how to tell this story in an engaging way - key sequences abruptly end in midstream, suddenly cutting to several days afterwards in the future. Because of this, we don't get to see how characters immediately reacted to what had been happening, and they almost seem to be acting like nothing happened. That's bad enough, but what's worse is that, believe it or not, nothing of real significance happens apart from those few sequences. Beaumont seems aware of this at times, being so desperate that at one point she has a long scene with a character engaged in a daydream that is about as blatant as padding can get. Not only that, she throws in a stupid "shock" ending that not only is utterly lame, but makes the movie feel even more unfinished than how it felt from the previous scene. Admittedly, Beaumont was hampered by the fact the Marlowe family, despite being a larger family than the norm, didn't have enough potential victims to spread out over 90 minutes. Perhaps if the family involved in this movie had been the Brady one, especially if cousin Oliver was there, there wouldn't have been that problem. Even if the problem still remained, I somehow have the suspicion that The Godsend still would have been much more entertaining than it is now. 
Check for availability on Amazon See also: Clownhouse, Daddy's Girl, The Other |
lucrative business of
co-productions with outside countries. Some of
these films include the Richard Roundtree caper
flick Diamonds, and the Jack
Palance gangster comedy-drama The Four
Deuces. By 1979, the cousins felt ready
to take the next step: conquer America. To make
it easier to set up shop in America, they bought
an already existing distribution company,
Cannon. Established in the late '60s, Cannon was
a distributor associated up to that point almost
exclusively with bottom-barrel exploitation
product - films like Cherry Hill High
and The Happy Hooker Goes To
Washington. With the Go-Go boys claiming
new ownership and wanting to show Hollywood its
force, what did they then
have Cannon subsequently release? Yep - more
bottom-barrel exploitation product! 
welcomes her into their house for the
evening. The strange woman proves to be equally
strange in personality, not knowing how to
handle the Marlow baby yet telling Kate and Alan
that her pregnancy is not her first ("I have
others," she sighs in her constant monotone
voice.) Just before leaving, and after secretly
severing the Marlowe's phone connection, she
goes into labor, and by the time Alan returns
from picking up the doctor (Barr - who?), Kate
has successfully assisted the mysterious woman
in giving birth to a healthy baby girl. "I'd
like a cigarette," is the woman's bland response
to this joyous news. She is refused cigarettes,
which might explain why the next morning Kate
discovers that the woman has vanished and left
her baby behind.
except for
one moment, death happens off-screen, being
discovered minutes after the fact. One other
horrific moment, where none of the characters
dies, not only happens off-screen but is
revealed over a day after the fact, maybe
because what happened is a total rip-off of
something that happened in The Omen.
For that matter, there's no
bad language, no nudity, and the one scene of
"cuddling" has the same intensity of such a
moment filmed for a television show in the
1970s. (Incredibly, despite being almost free of
naughty stuff, the movie still got slapped with
an R rating, no doubt further pissing off the
few grindhouse and drive-in patrons who paid to
see it.)
Golan and Globus. Most of the problems
can be traced directly back to director Gabrielle Beaumont.
Though the cousins were often notorious
penny-pinchers, I still cannot help but think Beaumont blew most of the budget on those
pretty opening helicopter shots (as well as
later helicopter footage of London) because the
remainder of the movie comes across as
particularly shabby, even when compared to other
drive-in and grindhouse movies of the time. The
visual look is soft and blurry, even when it
isn't one of those times the lens is smeared
with Vaseline. While you might think that the
decision to shoot inside real houses and other
buildings might give the setting a more
authentic feel, instead you feel extremely
claustrophobic with the actors and props all
squeezed tightly together as a result, not to
mention the movie's generally poor lighting and
badly-recorded audio gets aggravated further as
a result. 