Jim Morazzini
I remember seeing the advert for The Children on TV late one night. I don’t remember what I was watching, but I remember the advert being a mix of cheap cheesiness and creepy vibes that caught my attention. Unfortunately, the film wasn’t playing anywhere near me and I had to wait and rent it later.
The film opens with a couple of workers at a nuclear power plant blaming their inability to find a leak on the incompetence of their boss and deciding to call it a day and go have a beer. Well, the jokes are on them as the camera pans back into the power plant and we see a yellow gas rising from a pipe.
From there we ride on a bus full of school children on their best behavior, who actually sing a song about how nice their bus driver is, while the bus drives through a cloud of a familiar looking gas.
Sheriff Hart (Gil Rogers, Luther the Geek, WW and the Dixie Dancekings) soon finds it abandoned with the engine running near the cemetery. Since he suspects a kidnapping like the one in Chowchilla a few years ago, he radios Deputy Timmons (Tracy Griswold, All My Children, Mentor) and they set up roadblocks. If he had simply walked to the cemetery, he would have found the driver, or what was left of him, and learned that something was wrong with the children.
The Children was written by Carlton J. Albright (Luther the Geek) and Edward Terry, who originally directed the film but was replaced early in the shoot by Max Kalmanowicz (Dreams Come True). They created a film that, while not as shocking as the piranhas in the bathtub scene in Devil Times Five or the black humor of Bloody Birthday, still holds its own against the American killer kid films.
It seems as though the radioactive gas has turned the children into little zombies with creepy grins, black fingernails and the ability to burn people by hugging them. The burning scenes are filmed using a series of shots of the actor in various stages of Craig Lyman’s (The Stuff, Last Action Hero) makeup. It’s simple, effective and better than the CGI used in more contemporary evil child films like Cruel Peter or Playhouse.
As more and more children find their way home and bring deadly greetings to their parents, Sheriff Hart teams up with John Freemont (Martin Shakar, Invasion USA, Blood Bath) and his pregnant wife Cathy (Gale Garnett, Happy Mother’s Day, Love George, My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and the film becomes a variation of Night of the Living Dead. Only bullets have no effect on the children; instead of shooting them in the head, their hands have to be cut off.
Although some of the deaths occur off-screen, there is a fairly high body count in The Children, including some characters you wouldn’t expect to die. It’s not exactly a nihilistic film, but it does have a dark tone overall. The humor it does have is more of the kind you probably don’t see in many current films. The sheriff asks the mother of one of the missing children if she’s come home, and is only given the response, “Isn’t she a little young for you? She’s only nine,” and that with a grin, no less. In another scene, Cathy pats her swollen belly and apologizes to the fetus while smoking a cigarette.
The cinematography by Barry Abrams, who worked on four Sean S. Cunningham films including Friday the 13th and A Stranger is Watching, is simple but effective. This is especially true in the film’s night scenes, which include an homage to Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot. And if the score for The Children sounds familiar, that’s because it was composed by Harry Manfredini, who reused parts of it in Friday the 13th.
While I know my opinion of The Children is colored by nostalgia, both for the film itself and for the rural Massachusetts setting where it was primarily filmed in the Pittsfield area, I think it still holds up quite well. It’s not a classic, nor is it trying to be something it isn’t. But it’s an entertaining piece of low-budget regional filmmaking that combines some scary moments with a bit of kitsch for an entertaining afternoon.
Originally distributed by World Northal, The Children has been released on everything from VHS to a Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome, which restores a missing scene between the sheriff and a waitress at a diner. The film is also available on various streaming platforms, including Tubi.