WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? sucks. It is officially the first shitty movie of Horrorfest 2011. It was bound to happen. I’ve enjoyed some more than others, but all had redeeming qualities until now. Even HOUSE! How this movie came to be so well regarded among movie buffs is beyond me. Maybe the people who claim to like it have never actually seen it? I guess that’s a possibility.
The premise sounds okay – it’s about a British couple (Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ronsome) on vacation in Spain. They travel to an isolated island and find it eerily devoid of any adults, but crawling with creepy kids who seem to watch their every move. Of course, it turns out the kids have been killing the adults, and the vacationing couple becomes the next potential victims.
Director Narciso Ibanez Serrador makes a false step that’s hard to recover from right out of the gate, starting off with a montage of documentary footage. As a narrator intones how the wars of adults take their worst toll on the innocent children who are caught in the crossfire, we see disturbing and graphic footage of Auschwitz, the Korean War, and other atrocities. The images specifically focus on the plight of the children involved, so we get at least 5 minutes of footage of emaciated kids, both living and dead, intercut with freeze frames so the credits can roll over the sound of children laughing and playing. That’s irony, folks.
Is this approach heavy handed? Yes. Is it also totally inappropriate to use this sensitive footage for the purposes of a shitty exploitation movie? Yes. These are images of real people with real lives that really had unimaginably terrible things happen to them, right in the middle of their complete misery. The last thing they need is the added insult and indignity of having their misery cheaply exploited.
So, after this immediate derailment, the movie goes on to show us our lead couple on holiday. Here we get endless shots of crowd celebrations as the couple looks on. They try to get a hotel, they buy film for their camera, they watch fireworks. It’s boring as hell, the couple has nothing interesting to say, they don’t seem to have any chemistry, and they don’t seem to be particularly pleasant people. The woman is so pregnant that she’s clearly showing, and her husband ruminates right in front of her about whether or not it’s wise to bring a child into this world. Good one, asshole.
The couple is also exceedingly stupid. This must just be a result of the filmmakers giving them stupid shit to say. The wife has never heard of Federico Fellini, she doesn’t know how to say “Thank you” in Spanish (it’s “gracias,” by the way) and she doesn’t know what a piñata is. When a local clearly motions for her to move from the back of a boat to the front of the boat, she shrugs happily and says, “Sorry, I don’t understand!” and just sits there. All this wouldn’t be so bad except it’s clear that the audience is not supposed to think these people are stupid. The filmmakers don’t even realize how dumb they’ve made their central characters.
This stupidity extends to their interactions with the killer kids on the deserted island, which they finally get to about 45 minutes into the movie. Under normal circumstances his wouldn’t be so bad (see JAWS and KING KONG) except that in this movie 45 minutes seems like 4 hours. Here, our heroes are about as stupid as your average horror victim – they back themselves into corners, they refuse to run away when it makes sense to run away, they give the murderers the benefit of the doubt – all the stuff teenagers usually do in an effort to help Freddy and Jason kill them.
To its further disservice, the movie also attempts to have a couple ideas and fails miserably. The first thought the movie has is, “With all the innocent kids suffering in the world, what if they suddenly fought back?” I guess that’s the excuse for the documentary footage at the beginning of the movie – it’s all at the service of making this shallow, pseudo-philosophical point. Unfortunately it’s totally disingenuous because none of the events in the movie are in any way tied to any of the events in the gruesome opening.
The only possible connection would be if the children have some kind of collective unconscious they’re acting on or if God has reached down and directed them to murder adults in an act of vengeance for their kind. Even that would be ridiculous, however, since all adults used to be children and all children eventually become adults. What about the fact that no kid would make it past the first few days of life without adults keeping them alive? Huh? Riddle me that one, Narciso Ibanez Serrador!
The other half baked “idea” this movie has is that the murderous children have a built in defense mechanism since any adult in their right mind would be averse to hurting them. Once again, this is ridiculous, since we’re treated to footage at the beginning of the movie of innocent children suffering at the hands of adults, directly refuting the premise. On top of that, the innocence of children kind of goes out the window when you witness one killing someone in cold blood right in front of you. At that point, for most rational people, the survival instinct would kick in and it would quickly become a case of “him or me.”
Let’s face it, Narciso Ibanez Serrador – you included that documentary footage for nothing more than cheap shock value. The footage was free, doesn’t require any special effects, and allows you to show real dead and dying children, which you’d never be able to show in any other context. You didn’t have to shoot it, or light it, or cast it, or anything. All those victims were kind enough to be tortured and killed for you, just for your shitty movie. Asshole.
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