yes , august is upon us and with it comes the second appearance of the twice-yearly dumping ground for hollywood . like the february doldrums , august brings us films filled with fading stars and awful storylines that weren't deemed good enough to break even after a big summer marketing campaign , nor will they be able to go toe to toe with meatier fare during oscar season . and to open august , enter bless the child , possibly the worst movie i've seen this year . well , after mission to mars . swallow hard before reading this ridiculous plot synopsis , which i can already tell is going to be painful to type . in a nutshell , jesus has returned to earth in the form of a little girl ( holliston coleman ) , who is abandoned by her druggie mother ( angela bettis ) as an infant , to be raised by aunt maggie ( kim basinger ) . six years later , satan's minions are out to kill the girl , of course . and this year , satan's head minion is a new agey creep named eric stark ( rufus sewell ) , determined to convert the jesus girl to the dark side before easter . . . or else she must die ! ( i guess they picked easter because , you know , they missed the whole millennial paranoia genre window by about a year . ) enter an occult-expert fbi agent ( jimmy smits ) and you've got a kind of cop-thriller-paranormal sixth sense wannabe that makes apocalyptic pap like end of days look like the seventh seal . while young coleman is a gifted actress , the movie has her doing little more than beating her head against the wall , hugging people , or spinning stuff with her magical powers ( backed up by lousy digital effects ) . basinger proves that , yes , l . a . confidential was a total fluke and that she can't act after all . and sewell appears to be channeling dr . evil for his goofy bad guy role . while christina ricci is being used to sell this film to the unsuspecting masses , her part is barely a cameo comprising three minutes of screen time . but bad acting doesn't kill bless the child , it's the bad plot that aborts this production . driven by randomness , coincidence , and just plain stupidity on the part of the characters , the movie wanders from scene to scene with little more purpose than filling 100 minutes before we get to the inevitable showdown at the end . this has been a successful m . o . for action films for a century -- but few have had the gall to try to work in a god vs . devil plot . the film is so over the top that maggie's car , when falling off a bridge , can't just splash into the water -- it has to explode into flames on the way down . the film is so derivative it actually steals lines from other movies ( notably a slight variation on " the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist " from the usual suspects ) . and the film is so amazingly obvious that you expect stark's limo to have " 666 " on the license plates . altogether , bless the child is almost bad enough to become a cult classic . 
