The Children

After so many good reviews I was pretty psyched to see The Children. Several times I'd seen it put on a par with "Eden Lake", which I thought was one of the most tense, horrifying, well-conceived horrors of recent times.

I must say it started out really promising. It looked like it was paying close attention to building atmosphere and establishing characters - which is a rarity these days. It was quiet and disturbing for the first half hour, not to mention beautifully shot. I was settling in nicely, absorbed into the character's little Christmas get-together, and pleasantly anticipating the start of the horror.

But then it really went off the rails fast. There was a sudden rapid-fire sequence of ill-conceived, unbelievable, almost "Rube-Goldbergian" death and injury scenes, followed by a bunch of hysterical characters who - if they weren't doing something downright stupid and frustrating - were instead doing something that just didn't make any sense.

I spent a good deal of the last half of the film turning to my significant other and saying "I don't get why that character just did that..." The characters motivations for even the simplest actions through the last half of the film seem so weak as to almost be alien. In fact, the evil "possessed" children were acting in a more understandable way than the apparently normal adults.

You can't excuse the way the adults in the film act by simply believing they are operating under extreme circumstances the way you can in movies like "Eden Lake". But you can explain it by shoddy, lazy writing. Most of the movies I've seen in recent weeks had okay screenplays but floundered on bad directing. This was the exact opposite - beautiful directing ruined by a really weak script.

Dangit I'd hoped this would be a good one. Oh well, onto the next...

The Children is directed by Tom Shankland who adapts the screenplay from a Paul Andrew Williams story. It stars Eva Birthistle, Stephen Campbell, Hannah Tointon, Eva Sayer, William Howes, Rachel Shelley and Jeremy Sheffield. Music is by Stephen Hilton and cinematography by Nanu Segal.

A Christmas holiday at a remote country home turns into a fight for survival when the children suddenly start to turn on the adults.....

Could you kill your own kid? There's a nasty edge to Shankland's little shocker, and we are not just talking about creepy kids offing adults here. Although lifting freely from classic evil-children horrors from the past, The Children manages to remain fresh by playing on the aspect of the parents' refusal to accept that their cherubic offspring could do evil. Even when faced with blatant malevolence, the adults struggle to fight back. I mean, could you drop-kick your own child down the stairs? Added kicker in the writing is that the only character in the set-up who grasps what is going on is the troubled teenager (Tointon excellent), a nice twist for it is so often the case in horror movies that we bemoan dumb teens doing even dumber things.

With the makers unfolding the drama amongst a virginal snowy setting, there's much thought gone into crafting more than just a standard gory shocker. Shankland shows a good sense of mood and pacing, drip-feeding the unease and never getting carried away with the premise. His closeup camera-work has an unsettling quality to it, while the deaths are inventive and mercifully not over done, the editing neatly giving us the viewers the chance to fill in the blanks. Some of the adult actors irritate rather than gain our belief, and the odd "dumb" reaction to a situation rears its ugly head. But mostly this is a thoughtful and spicy Brit horror that's worth seeking out by those after more than your rank and file slasher movie. 7/10

Being a Horror Film person I have seen them all and was not expecting much from the trash that is flushed out to us. But I'm pleased to tell you that this movie was a nice surprise. The plot was basic, the characters were believable, and the movie had a nice pace. To most the premise itself seems to have been done before but No it has not the way that this film does it. All is revealed in this film and the cause is actually believable. I would highly recommend this film to anyone that enjoys horror films. The people that got on to give this one a low score obviously know nothing about the genre and need to go rate movies like High school musical or Paul Blart the Mall Cop. Official Chickencow post unaffiliated with any Film Company

I wasn't expecting that much from this movie, because it all just seemed very familiar. Evil children turning on their parents who are too dumb to notice anything's wrong until it's too late, there are at least a dozen movies like that. Combine that with an incredibly uninspired title and you get a movie that just sits on my shelf for years.

Unjustly, because as unoriginal and predictable this movie is...it's also really freightening! The scary atmosphere is done really well, and it helps that you don't actually see the children kill for the first two acts. It's all in the power of suggestion, and in the feeling of dread you get from every scene. The child actors are also great, their blank, unemotional stares send shivers down my spine. The plot follows the creepy kid formula beat by beat, but it's not a problem. Just take the obligatory first kill, the one that always looks like it's an accident. That scene is executed perfectly, really unnerving. The movie never really drops the ball from then on.

There's nothing ground-breaking about "The Children", there's not even anything interesting to the plot. It's very much style over substance, but the style is great and that's enough for me to recommend it.

Horrid smug Middle class parents get killed by and kill their own children, what could be better? Who could not enjoy this? Well, other than 15 year olds who can't appreciate a horror film with *shock horror* time spent on genuine character development, a decent script and people behaving in a believable manner when confronted and confused by the horror they're confronted with.

The Children is great because it's a rare oasis in the desert of generic (mainly US) horror, these are parents who understandably find it difficult to accept their own children have become killers and are obviously not too enamoured with the idea of killing their own offspring (which explains to certain 15 year old fools why the adults are so easily overcome). There are no generic idiot teens walking into danger for no discernible reason, in fact the one teen Casey (played excellently by Hannah Tointon) is the strongest character in the film.

This is the best Horror film I've seen in quite a while...if it doesn't appeal to teenage horror fans...so much the better.