The Children is a horror film I fondly recall from my younger days of exploring the genre. I saw it on a late-night viewing on Showtime, I believe. If I remember correctly, for a while there in the early 80’s, they would show a horror double feature every Friday night. They played mostly pure trash, but it was there I discovered many, many gems, including the original Friday the 13th as well as this little movie. Which is funny, because later I would learn that The Children was filmed at the same time as F13 and used much of the same crew, so in a weird way, they are sister films. Oh, and Harry Manfredini did the score for this one, too, and you can certainly hear not only strains of F13, but whole passages in it.
So this is what happens: a couple of clods at a nuclear power plant don’t pay attention to a faulty pipe and some weird, yellow, radioactive mist escapes. It drifts across the bucolic countryside and envelops a school bus carrying young kids on their way home. It turns the kids into homicidal maniacs, with blackened fingernails and grips of death. They literally grab you and you burn to death as more of that weird yellow mist steams around. Man, the 80’s were great. If you got hit with radiation, you became a superhero, a mutant, or a monster. Anyway, yes, it’s ridiculous, but that’s exactly what you’re in this for: boobs, creepy kids, bloodless dismemberment, and high strangeness. The Children delivers all of this for your viewing pleasure, along with some easy-going humor.
Is this a masterpiece? By no means. Is it fun? Hell yes it is. If you want something serious and meditative, run far away. But if you want to turn off your mind for a while and watch some carnage, you’ve come to the right place. And as a bonus, there are some genuinely creepy moments. While the actual execution of the killings by the kids is ham-fisted, their zombie expressions and the burnt human corpsicles that result are not. Also, there is a taboo to killing kids on screen, much less chopping off their hands and arms and legs. This seems to be the only way to stop them, and thank god someone has a stray katana laying around for the job to get done. So you get some envelope-pushing, as well.
All these years later, The Children still stands up as what it always was, a curio from a time gone by. No way you could make a film like this today without turning totally to comedy. This one takes itself pretty seriously and that’s exactly why it works. Beware…The Children!
Three Stars out of Four