Traci has a problem. The man she loves is a giant douchebag that can barely tolerate keeping her around as an occasional booty call. Oh, and she had an abortion and as a result is being stalked by a legion of creepy baby face-masked killers, that’s a concern as well I guess.

Blessed Are the Children is an absolute chore to sit through, with a running time of over 100 minutes and enough depth to barely justify a 10-minute short on Youtube. Traci Patterson, along with her friends Mandy and Erin, is what you might expect to find if you look up the word “basic” in the dictionary. Lacking the ability to process any thought beyond guys, drinking, and shopping, Traci nonetheless feels compelled to engage herself in inane monologues that only serve to solidify just how little the audience should care about her character. The primary object of Traci’s focus is John, a man she claims to be in love with on account of the fact he has a big dick and is in school training to become a doctor. Unfortunately John’s brain seems to have been replaced with hay and the only things he’s capable of processing is who he feels like screwing on any given night and his complete and utter contempt for Traci.

Complicating matters is Ben, Traci’s ex-fiancee who plays the role of vaguely menacing drunk guy. Luckily for Traci and everyone involved, this plot line never actually goes anywhere and is quietly and unceremoniously dropped by the middle of the film. Everything is going great for Traci, she has the personality of soggy mashed potatoes and a man that will occasionally tolerate looking at the back of her head in exchange for sex. Sadly, Traci’s idyllic life comes tumbling down when she becomes pregnant as a result of one of these one-night stands. Ultimately she decides to have an abortion, a decision that is treated with all of the weight and dramatic implications of deciding between a grande and a venti pumpkin-spiced latte. As with nearly every plot line in this film, the abortion has virtually no narrative impact, but does serve as the justification for a small army of militant anti-abortionists to begin killing off everyone she’s ever met for implicitly enabling her actions.

This leads to a solid hour of uninspired kills with effects that look like they could have come from a high school class project, interspersed with moments that attempt to develop the characters of Traci and her friends, but instead only succeed at making the viewer long for their demise, as underwhelming as that demise may be. The dialog is stilted and unnatural, and numerous flubbed lines managed to make it into the final cut, leading to the conclusion that everything must have been shot in a single take. There are moments where the viewer is expected to sympathize with Traci as she’s berated by her shrill harpy of a mother, but one can only feel sorry for the mother as she comes to terms with raising such a tremendous disappointment of a daughter. Arguably the only bright spot among these performances comes from Traci’s friend Erin, a 26-year old virgin that is at one point given some degree of character development and displays a modicum of actual charm, though this too is short-lived.

Remove the vain attempts at developing character arcs and you’re left with a frustratingly monotone by-the-books slasher, where most of the kills are hidden behind camera edits, and when the kills are shown you really wish they weren’t due to the amateurish execution that completely robs the scene of any level of suspense. Blessed Are the Children starts out as a promisingly inept piece of film making that I could almost recommend if you want to have a few drinks and riff on the stupidity of it all with some friends, but by the halfway point is stripped of even its inadvertent comedic potential and becomes simply dull and predictable. From a technical perspective there are worse films out there, but some of them manage to find themselves in “so bad it’s good territory”. Blessed Are the Children is just bad, and I could only recommend it to marvel at just how much of a train wreck the first half hour is before it devolves into complete banality. The film stars Kaley Ball, Keni Bounds, Arian Thigpen, Jordan Boyd, and David Moncrief. It is written and directed by Chris Moore.