Legend has it, that since the 1700s, a creature known only as 'The Jersey Devil' has haunted an area of Southern New Jersey called 'The Pine Barrens'. This mysterious beast is reportedly part animal, part man, and all evil and is supposedly responsible for numerous human and animal deaths since the colonial days when the area was initially being settled. The origins of the monster are rooted in Native American folk stories about a Shaman who was able to shape shift and who turned his thirteenth child into the monster that became known as 'The Jersey Devil' to take revenge on the British Army.

Taking that myth as the basis for the film 13th Child – Legend Of The Jersey Devil, director Steven Stockage tells the story of Special Agent Tatum (Michelle Maryk) who is assigned by the office of the District Attorney to investigate a new rash of killings that has begun again in The Pine Barrens area.

Working together with some of the local police officers, she uncovers a mysterious old house inhabited by a wealthy man who goes by the rather secretive moniker of Mr. Shroud (Oscar Winner Cliff Robertson). As she gets to know him and he invites her into his home to discuss the case over dinner, she gets pulled deeper into the mystery surrounding the murders that may or may not have been carried out by the Jersey Devil himself.

Luckily for Tatum, a retried police officer named Riley (Robert Guillaume of TV's Benson) knows what's going on, as he dealt with similar events twenty years earlier. The problem is that he's locked in a mental hospital and that no one believes him.

While I am admittedly a sucker for any horror film based on urban legends or old folk stories, 13th Child has a few too many flaws for it to be a really effective horror film. It ends up coming off as a mediocre episode of The X-Files and the story does leave a few plot holes dangling by the end of the movie.

Performances from Robertson and Guillaume are reasonably strong, but the rest of the cast delivers more than a few stilted lines of dialogue that are almost painful to hear. The cinematography isn't bad though, and it captures some of the interesting locales that the filmmakers wisely chose to shoot at quite nicely. Shroud's old mansion is effectively eerie and some of the scenes that take place in the woods are also very well done, giving one a feeling of dread that other films with bigger budgets have failed to capture as well.

Video:

MTI presents 13th Child in a 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, which appears to be overmatted quite bit, as a lot of the shots are missing the tops of the characters' heads (Either that, or the compositions are just poor). It looks the film was shot on digital video as there is quite a bit of 'video noise' on the transfer that is most evident during the darker scenes in the movie. Colors are decent enough, and the filmmakers used a lot of brown and orange hues in amongst the darker blacks to give it a nice 'woodsy' feel that suits the tone of the movie well. There are a few instances where some mild compression artifacts do rear their ugly heads and the film does suffer a bit because of this.