Sorry guys, but horror movies involving creepy little kids don’t really do it for me. I guess that out of all the horror movies I’ve seen involving kids, I end up thinking about how they’re little kids and I am a full grown adult and in a one on one fight, I could probably win. This isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed movies that have evil kids as antagonists, like Citadel and its demonic little thugs or The Children and its theory about there not being accidents when a kid hurts an adult and they really are just being a shithead. All I’m saying is that the mere concept of little kids being creeps isn’t all that exciting for me. However, the recent Come Out and Play piqued my interested, despite not having seen the movie that it was a remake of, the Spanish ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? or Who Can Kill a Child? According to Wikipedia articles, this remake ended up being pretty close in plot to the original film, which was based on a novel, so some of you might appreciate that, but ultimately, this ended up being another creepy little kid movie that I didn’t connect with. Since one of the segments I had strong opinions on was the ending, there’s going to be spoilers in this review, but you can’t really get pissed at me for ruining the ending of a story that has been around for almost 40 years. Got it?
Absolutely no muscle definition whatsoever! Even I could take these kids! Well, at least the little ones.
While on vacation, Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) tracks down someone with a boat so he can take his pregnant wife Beth (Vinessa Shaw) to a nearby remote island. Once they get to the island, they have a hard time finding any adults and none of the kids they see running around are pretty unresponsive. When Francis finally sees an older man in the street and attempts to talk to him, the old man is ambushed, attacked, and murdered by a bunch of little kids. SOMETHING WEIRD IS GOING ON HERE! After locking themselves in a hotel, they encounter another adult who explains that in the middle of the night, the kids on the island starting laughing loudly, followed shortly by their parents screaming. As Francis and Beth try to get back to their boat, they are swarmed by the kids and are able to get into a car and drive to the other side of the island. While there, they see some little kids who don’t seem to be affected, but when the kids from the side of the island they just left catch up to them, they stare at the nice kids long enough to make them start acting like dickheads too. The kids overwhelm them and they retreat to a jail where they are able to get a gun from a dead officer, but the kids get one too, and when a kid holds a gun to Beth, Francis shoots and kills him. BETH DOESN’T LIKE THAT. Beth starts complaining of her baby hurting her, starts bleeding from her lady areas and down her leg, and then just dies. Yup, just like that. Dead from the inside. This bums out Francis so he sets her body on fire. After his mourning, Francis goes back out to face the horde of rugrats. Since he has an automatic weapon, he just starts fucking shooting all of them until he runs out of bullets! Since they’re little kids, a bunch of them start crying, so he jumps over them and runs back to his boat. Some of the kids catch up to him, and, being an adult, Francis easily beats the shit out of most of them. Unfortunately, the Coast Guard interrupts his child murdering by shooting him, only to have the little kids kill the Coast Guard and steal their boat to make their way to the mainland. Or maybe to buy some Bieber CDs, who knows, the movie ended there.
Damn, bro! Where’d you get those cool as jeans?!
Dammit, writer/director Makinov! Right at the end there you went from not that great to pretty good and then back to not that great in five minutes! Up until the climax, it was a pretty standard “couple in trouble” story. This couple, ya see, they’re in trouble, and there’s no one who can help them! The lady, ya see, well she’s pregnant! So that makes things difficult! I didn’t really see how her being pregnant moved the story forward, other than it gave the character an easy death at just the right moment that the story needed a death. Some people might say, “Oh so it was her BABY turning evil and killing her!”, while others, like me, would say, “How could that baby have turned evil when having only been on the island for a few hours and with none of the other evil little kids staring directly at it?” That was another issue I had, which was there was really no rhyme or reason as to why these kids ALL started acting like dickheads at the same time, while other kids on the island didn’t react that way. I don’t need everything to be spelled out for me, and I like ambiguity when it comes to those things, but this movie offered no real reason why this stuff happened on this island. I guess in the original, there were some implications that the atrocities of war that these kids experienced and seeing the effects of war on adults is what caused the kids to “take matters into their own hands”, but there was still the whole eye contact thing which I still just don’t get. We also don’t really know why Francis was so desperate to get to the island in the first place, which might seem like a nitpicky thing to single out, but considering how the first few minutes of the movie he seemed so desperate to get to this island, I thought there’d be more significance to the island once they had gotten there. Even though this movie had quite a few things going against it, the scene where Francis basically says, “FUCK THIS!” and starts dominating these little kids was pretty awesome. I’d say that’s always the thought running through my brain when I see “evil children” movies, which is, “Hey, those kids are little and you’re big and strong.” I mean, Francis really goes for it. He just fucking tosses kids into the ocean like they’re…I don’t know, small children? Then the stupid fucking Coast Guard had to show up to give it a “darker” ending or whatever it was and it went back to being not that great. Maybe if you’re terrified of little kids then this movie could be a little creepier, but the unanswered questions I had and sacrificing the logical ending for the more open-ended one made the movie a little disappointing.
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More like HACKinov…damn that joke was bad.
Dude, you’re talking to ME about bad jokes? Don’t even go there. I thought it was weird that he only went by one name, because I thought maybe he’d done a bunch of other shit, but that’s the only movie he’s done! What the fuck?! At least give it a few movies before you’re like “I’M FUCKING MACKINOV!!!!”
I just watched this film. Thought it was pretty good. Did you guys notice the spark plugs in the bottom of the boat? I’m kinda thinking the boat wouldn’t have started anyway.