Colibel
Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.
Raetsonwe
Redundant and unnecessary.
Kimball
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Art Vandelay
This film is staged ham. Not surprisingly since most of the cast was apparently held over from its Broadway run. Only the mother Nancy Kelly seems to have caught on that she's acting in a film here. Everyone else is hamming it up for the cheap seats. That kid. Yikes. She delivers her lines like a brat in a community theatre production of Little Orphan Annie. This is conceivably the worst performance by a juvenile I have ever seen committed to film. Ever. The drunken mom of the dead boy? Holy ham bones, Shakespeare, she's playing to seats to cheap and so far away she might as well be in Yankee Stadium. Similarly, the teacher and the gardener fair very poorly. Hard to believe a veteran director of the big screen would let his actors run away from him like this. Maybe it would have worked on Philco's Monster Horror Chiller Theatre or whatever they called it on the 50s b00b tube.
Hitchcoc
Patty McCormick spent her whole life being referred to as "The Bad Seed." This is a study in how much something evil can manifest itself in the world when left unchecked. The clueless adults in the girl's life are at the center of everything. A friend once told me that if you act like a worm, someone is going to step on you. Patty (Rhoda) is utterly evil. She will do anything, including murder because she is psychotic. She also has the wherewithal to pull the wool over the eyes of others. I'm giving this an eight because I think the ending is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. There is no evidence to say that this is an act of the supernatural. If they were going to pull that out, they would have needed a little bit of foreshadowing.
CaptainCutie
I would definitely say that this film is definitely classified into the right genre. This film is a great horror film, I like how it was not like some of the horror movies that you see now a days were all they consist of is jump scares. The story line of this movie kept you interested and entertained throughout the whole film and it was truly a horror story that was shown in a great way in this film. I think the actors in this movie did an awesome job of portraying their characters and made this film even better and kept the audience interested in the story. One thing that I have to say about this film is that it does have a very dark story line, or twist to it shall I say but overall I have to say this was such a great movie and was a true horror movie that gets you scared!
Antonius Block
A seemingly prim and proper 8-year-old girl is suspiciously near a classmate who earned a medal instead of her when he drowns, thus setting off questions about her involvement in his death. The concept of an evil child is inherently eerie, and the film likens the possibility of one who can commit murder to Mozart showing his talent for music at a very young age. There are a couple of chilling moments as the mother's suspicions grow and the past unfolds, her own as well as the child's, but the film drags in places, lacks tension, and is too long at 129 minutes. It also suffers from a ridiculous ending which was not present in the novel or play, and entirely due to the Hays Code. Nancy Kelly is reasonably good in the role of the mother, but it's surprising to me that she and a couple of co-stars were nominated for Academy Awards, including Patty McCormack, the child, who was mediocre. I suspect the acclaim was due to the content being more shocking in 1956, but today, the film is just barely passable. As a side note, though, it's interesting that the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds got its name from the novel.
