By Richard Winters
My Rating: 6 out of 10
4-Word Review: Children kill the adults.
Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), who is pregnant, travel to an island off the coast of Spain in order to find some peace and quiet while on vacation. Once they arrive they find the place conspicuously devoid of any adults with many of the shops and bars looking like they’ve been abandoned. The only people around are children who behave strangely and will not talk to Tom, or Evelyn even when spoken to directly. They then come upon an adult survivor named Padre (Antonio Iranzo) who describes to them how the night before the children suddenly went crazy and began killing all the adults on the island without any provocation. Can Tom and Evelyn escape, or will they become yet another victim?
While there’s been other movies detailing children, or even groups of kids, who murder the adults around them this one is considered the granddaddy of all of them and, though not ever verified, the possible inspiration to Stephen King’s Children of the Corn. The film’s creepiness comes not so much with scares, as there’s very little of that, but more through its quiet atmosphere and isolation that grows increasingly more ominous as it goes. Violence-wise it’s scarce with only the minimum of gore though the sequence done over the opening credits, which has grisly real-life footage of victims of the Holocaust as well as both the Korean and Vietnam Wars is not for the squeamish and may be too explicit and grim for some to sit through.
The script was written in only a matter of 4 short days and it shows with character motivations that aren’t particularly well thought out. For instance I didn’t understand why Tom wouldn’t tell Evelyn about what he saw, in regards to the child beating up and eventually killing an old man, and wanted to somehow play down and even lie about what was going on. This is a pregnant woman who has a right to know about the dangers lurking about. Shielding her from the horrifying realities isn’t going to help her be alert and put up her defenses and if anything just make her more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by the kids. What kind of husband lies to his wife about such urgent matters? Does he think because she’s female she won’t be ‘strong enough’ to handle the truth? If so it makes him sexist and not particularly likable because of it.
Tom also is too slow to respond to things. Even after witnessing first hand the children’s atrocities he doesn’t immediately try to arm himself, get off the island, or board him and his wife off in some sort of safe room with a fortified door. Instead they remain pretty much out in the open in an abandoned hotel with both the entrances and exits wide open for anyone to come into. At one point he even gives his wife a sedative and tells her to take a nap inside one of the hotel rooms while leaving the door open as he goes downstairs to speak to the male survivor, but how does he know a kid won’t sneak into the room while he’s gone?
It’s strange too how the children kill a Dutch woman and even strip off her clothes, but when Tom walks in they all scurry away. If they’ve already killed a vast number of adults why would they fear Tom when he comes in and instead not just attack him too? For that matter why does Tom feel so emboldened to walk in on these kids to begin with? He’s seen what terrible things they can do, so why does he risk exposing himself to them? These clearly aren’t normal kids, so he should remain at a safe distance and view what they’re doing from a hiding spot.
While there’s creepy moments and imagery it all mainly comes during the third act and some more scares and action earlier could’ve helped. The special effects aren’t too great either with the shot of the bloodied old man, whose supposedly just been killed, clearly still breathing as his chest heaves up and down, though Tom carries him away like he’s now nothing more than a corpse. Having Padre describe the violent attacks of the children onto the adults from the previous night was disappointing as this should’ve been played out visually, even if through flashback, as it would be much scarier to see this instead of just being told about it.
Spoiler Alert!
The ending has its fair share of suspenseful moments, but again more logic loopholes. When Tom and Prunella are trapped in a room behind a wooden door a small child crawls through the window space and tries to shoot at them, but Tom manages to hit the kid with a bullet first with a rifle he’s found. The other kids then quit trying to break the door down the couple are in once they hear the shot and all go filing away. Tom says this is because none of the other adults responded with aggression and violence towards them like he did. Once they realized, by hearing the gunshot, that Tom meant business they all backed off knowing that he might kill them as well. However, the kids could not see through the door, the tiny window on it was too high up for them to look through, so for all they knew the gunshot was the sound of the small kid shooting the couple with his gun and therefore they should’ve continued the attack and not immediately stopped.
The children are also able to somehow brainwash their peers into doing their evil bidding by simply looking into their eyes, which somehow puts them under a spell. They even use this power to get the fetus inside Evelyn’s womb to attack her, but where do they get this power from? What kind of entity is behind all of this? Nothing gets answered, which leaves too many questions open and thus not as effective as it could’ve been.
My Rating: 6 out of 10
Released: April 26, 1976
Runtime: 1 Hour 53 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Narciso Ibanez Serrador
Studio: Penta Films
Available: DVD (Region 0), Blu-ray (Region B/2)