Beware! Children at Play [1989 Kids-gone-Wrong Horror, Troma]

BLOT: (29 Dec 2011 - 02:21:07 PM)

Beware! Children at Play [1989 Kids-gone-Wrong Horror, Troma]

There are three ways to watch Beware! Children at Play, a 1989 children-gone-bad horror cheapo horror movie from Troma:

#1, you can watch the first fifteen minutes and then realize that you have better things to do than spend the next hour and a quarter finishing the movie.

#2, you can stick with it, and worry that you've made a mistake for a good half hour more to go, and then they start talking about Beowulf and children start eating people and maybe it will be ok...just maybe...

#3, skip to the last 10 minutes, because that's why nearly everyone watches this movie, and if you chose option #2, you probably will end up wishing you had at least skipped 40-50 minutes along the way.

I went for the second option, though it was my usual "You Can't Make Me Turn Away" response to bad movies, moreso than any fear that I was wasting my time. I knew I was wasting my time and that gave me all the power over the situation. What we have, by the way, is a Children of the Corn knock off with only a couple of twists: The adults are still alive because we are at the point where the slaughter is beginning, and the children are not so much religious as kind of an English Lit cult with one hell of a hazing ceremony. The adults, more and more, are the ones with crazy Christian-cult hybrid tendencies.

John De Wolfe—one time writer of classy book reviews and now writer of schlocky stranger-than-fiction "true" weirdness books—brings his wife and kid to stay with Sheriff Ross Carr's family for a while: a family that is down to just a wife and one remaining daughter now that their oldest daughter has gone missing. She has presumably ran off with the Woodies, a group of children that run away into the woods and are not seen again. As De Wolfe and Carr investigate, and De Wolfe pushes the investigation into more paranormal avenues, the kids start coming back to target the adults they left behind. As these two threads play out, the townspeople begin resurrecting the tradition of the Brownies, a religious cult that slaughtered unbelievers some time ago in the town's bloodied history.

Now, this is a Troma film, so you probably know what to expect. Not quite the gonzo gore, but the CHEEP blood splatter, the stilted and uneven acting given by people who were likely local to the location chosen for the shoot, a few crowd scenes meant as something like a exposition dump straight out of the Greek Chorus tradition, long stretches of almost nothing used to pad the time, and so forth. Unlike a few of the Troma classics, the various cost-cutting techniques are rarely embraced to the film's advantage here, and so there are several rough points without the usual Troma-charm to make it all more tolerable. All jokes about "only see the last ten minutes" aside, a person could easily edit this down to about 45 minutes of film and make it a much better movie.

I'm going to come close to spoiling two things, here, so if you have some insane notion of watching this without spoilers, go ahead and bail. Ok, still with me? Here we go. First off, as implied above, the movie bases the backstory in Beowulf. One of the most interesting scenes in the whole thing is when a lesson about alliteration, Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the dangers of teaching such things to your children shows up right in the middle of a sequence of bloody deaths. Secondly, the most important scene in this movie is the final five or six minutes, where an entire town's worth of children are wiped out in bloody ways by their own parents. We are talking about gunshots, pitchforks, axes, knives, machetes, and something that looks like a log but seems to be sharp? The movie has picked up a bit of flack and controversy for the scene, but its not that bad. There are a few scenes with kids being shot that come across a little close to home, but most of the deaths are hokey enough—and the kids are obviously having a ball playing slaughter victims—to stop it from being particularly scarring. Besides, we are talking about cannibalistic, kidnapping, raping, murderers. Sure they could have probably have been rehabilitated, but it would have taken a moment.

Not a good movie. Definitely a bad movie. At best, I can only honestly give it a Meh. Still, if you only have ten minutes, fast forward and give it a go.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: December 2011