What everyone needs more of is the kind of endearing crud that horror movie makers with no money churned out so adoringly in the early ‘80s.
It seems hard to imagine a time when naivete ventured into the low-budget horror arena under any guise other than someone thinking it was easy to make a movie. But the folks behind The Children - through the crafting of this goofy, charming shocker - have set themselves up to be forever known as the Care Bears of horror.
The Children lets us in on the frightening goings on in the small town of Ravensback. Seems the schoolbus drove through a cloud of nuclear gas and the five kids onboard got turned into evil, radiation-packin’ zombies with the desire to kill all their parents.
On second thought, maybe The Children is a terrifyingly acurate cautionary tale for our times.
As the tension valiantly tries to mount, a goofy sheriff races back and forth, trying to figure out what happened to the kids while constantly stumbling over adult bodies that suffer sever radiation burns.
A curious twist prefiguring the Evil Dead ties up The Children tightly while providing an opening for a sequel that never happened.
Even though The Children suffers through no budget, a thin, stupid premise, tragically non-frightening villains and uneven performances, it holds your interest and earns its cult status.
The comic-relief sheriff counter-intuitively anchors the film, sapping most of the tension from the less-than-spooky, proto-preppy, hick children slowly shuffling around. But there’s something oddly compelling and a bit disturbing about these Adam Rich clones looming out of the darkness, buck teeth cooly glinting in the night air.
The Children is no Exorcist, but as a curious artifact from a time when low-budget meant much more than a digital video camera, it’s refreshingly honest, earnest and hilarious (even though it wasn’t meant to be.)
Extras
The lovely Vestron Video VHS cassette that Video Sewer screened contains no extras other than the Vestron logo and jingle that will warm any old video-hound’s heart. Of course, what should happen just after the Sewer rents The Children but Troma decides to put out a more-or-less definitve version on DVD. We hear it's pretty good.
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| It's pretty dang hard to make this title look menacing. |
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| These kids aren't helping things any ... |