The Devil Wears Mom Jeans

First off, a tip of the hat to Kelly, who, after reading my essay, “The Strange, Sick, Sad Career of Thomas Gibson,” clued me in to this little gem lurking in the murky lower depths of Gibson’s vast and oft-disturbing IMDB page. The Devil’s Child is a 1997 made-for-television movie, featuring Gibson as an unusually lackadaisical Devil who schemes to impregnate NYPD Blue’s Kim Delaney. It’s Rosemary’s Baby made fast and cheap, and it’s terrible. Hilariously, delightfully, endearingly terrible.

As The Devil’s Child has never been released on DVD in the United States (fancy that), I ordered my copy from overseas. For reasons that shall probably remain a mystery for the ages, the DVD box for the official UK release gives first billing not to Delaney or to Gibson, but to… Scooby-Doo’s Matthew Lillard, who has a supporting role as Delaney’s love-struck assistant, Tim.

Delaney plays Nikki DiMarco, a Los Angeles photographer who, due to a severe childhood accident, is unable to bear children. When her batty mother (Twin Peaks’ Grace Zabriskie) dies unexpectedly, Nikki inherits a windfall of cash and, at the urging of her best friend Ruby (Colleen Flynn), moves into an apartment in Ruby’s creepy old building. After a series of bizarre incidents, lapsed-Catholic Nikki begins to suspect Satanic forces were behind her mother’s death. Ruby mocks her for her religious paranoia, though in truth, Nikki’s status as the local Bible nut has been greatly exaggerated. When Ruby quotes lyrics from The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Nikki chimes in with, “That’s from Revelations.” Well, no, it’s not -- Nikki has somehow confused the fire-and-brimstone bombast of Revelations with the mellow, hippie-friendly vibe of Ecclesiastes.
Nikki soon becomes intrigued by her handsome and enigmatic neighbor, Alex (Gibson), who lives in the apartment across the hall and who has an outstanding secret identity: He’s the Devil, who made an unholy pact with Nikki’s mom twenty years ago to bring Nikki back to life following her accident, with the understanding that she would later bear his child.

Unaware of Alex’s sinister designs on her uterus, Nikki drops by his apartment one evening and finds him hanging out by himself, listening to music while wearing shapeless, unflattering, high-waisted jeans. An incisive commentary on the banality of evil, or just a bad call by someone in the wardrobe department? Alex and Nikki bop around his apartment together for a while (I’d make snotty comments about how their dancing is unhampered by either rhythm or soul, but he is the Devil, after all, so “soulless” is entirely appropriate), then head out for a romantic dinner, where Alex grouses in thinly-veiled terms about how it was totally bogus that God booted him out of Heaven. He also hand-feeds Nikki from his own plate, and while Nikki seems sort of charmed by this, as a general first-date rule, it’s probably best not to spontaneously reach across the table to cram chunks of your food into your date’s mouth.

Before long, Nikki and Alex tumble into bed together. Because even the Devil needs to pay the rent, Alex heads off to his day job as a Theology professor at a local university. A smitten Nikki secretly crashes his lecture and, for the first time, observes him doing something genuinely Devil-ish: using his omniscient knowledge of his students’ sex lives to slut-shame them in front of their classmates.

This, by the way, is the most diabolical thing he’ll do in public in the entire damn movie. All the rest of Alex’s dastardly deeds -- mowing down Nikki’s obnoxious coworker to snag her a plum promotion, chucking a Devil-loathing dog through a window, chucking a Devil-loathing Catholic priest through a window, sending a sexy emissary to murder Tim (ostensibly because Tim was snooping into Alex’s background, though “because Tim is a monstrously irritating twit” is also a satisfactory explanation) -- either happen demurely off-screen, or his involvement is only vaguely implied. Fine, though it’s a little disconcerting to realize Gibson brings more slinky malevolence and unfettered evil to his role in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas than he does to his role as, y’know, Lucifer.

Nikki is horrified by this glimpse into Alex’s dark side, though maybe she should’ve caught on to his dickish nature a bit earlier when, during their post-coital embrace, she confided in him about her inability to have kids and he responded with, “I bet you’d be a great mother!” Never one to do things partway, Nikki cruises straight past “the hot guy I just slept with turned out to be sort of nasty and sleazy” and lands on “the hot guy I just slept with is an inhuman Hell-demon.”

Nikki, it is established, doesn’t date much. You can kind of see why.

Despite her damaged reproductive system, Nikki becomes pregnant as a result of her tryst with Alex. She decides to cut all ties with him, which is tricky, since: a) he still lives across the hall, and b) he’s an omniscient force of all-powerful evil. She heads to an abortion clinic, which blows up just as she arrives, then visits a psychiatrist to sort out her feelings about her erstwhile suitor. “Isn’t it possible that Alex is the Devil?” she asks. Wisely, the psychiatrist refrains from weighing in on that topic.

Nikki’s worst fears are confirmed when she develops some photos of Alex and finds the Mark of the Beast – 666 – scrawled in Sharpie across his forehead. Her due date sort of sneaks up on her, and she ends up giving birth to a baby boy in Ruby’s apartment (there’s no time for her to get to the hospital, though there’s enough time for her obstetrician to hoof it to Ruby’s place to help with the delivery). When Alex shows up to claim his son, Nikki hightails it to the church for an emergency baptism to give the kid a little divine protection against his dad’s influence.

Alex dons his best cloak -- you know, the one he wore when he dressed up as a Nazgul for Comic Con -- and loiters around outside the church, extending himself so far as to kick up an ineffectual little windstorm in the chapel. When Nikki emerges triumphant with her freshly-baptized son, Alex unleashes the full brunt of his unholy might against her for thwarting his (unspecified) evil plans for their offspring…

Ha ha, no, of course he doesn’t. In keeping with his overall low-fuss (dare I say… devil-may-care?) attitude, he shrugs and slouches off, presumably to con more grieving mothers into letting him sleep with their daughters. In spite of all his painstaking and far-reaching plans -- in addition to Nikki’s mother, it turns out that Ruby, the psychiatrist, and the obstetrician were all in on his diabolical scheme -- the Devil is, at heart, a bit of a quitter. Humanity can breathe easy.