To escape the usual tourist hordes, Tom (Lewis Fiander) and his pregnant
wife Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) decide to spend their vacation on a little
island just off the Spanish coast. The apparent absence of grown-ups on the
island strikes them as odd right from the beginning, but first they think
little about it and make the best of it serving themselves at a bar that was
left open yet deserted. When they see a cute little girl violently beating up
an old man with his own cane, they do get a little (well very) suspicious, and it doesn't at all calm them down when the old man, only a few minutes
later, is hanging down a tree headfirst, and a gang of children use them as
the centerpiece of a kind of perverted Pinata, played with a sickle. Soon Tom
and Evelyn have caught the attention of the children, who seem to have gone
mental and they lock themselves into the local hotel to escape their attacks.
There they meet another tourist (Antonio Iranzo), who has gone half crazy with
fear, and who fills them in on some backgrounds: That all of a sudden, all
the children on the island have gone mad and started killing all the adults -
including his wife. By pure chance, he managed to escape ... up to now, as his
daughter (Maria Druille) shows up at the hotel's doorstep and akss her father
to come and help her ... and the girl lures him right into a trap set by
the kids. Now Tom and Evelyn know they have to make a run for it, even if
that means to use brute force against cute children, and eventually our
couple ends up in a jeep, searching the island for a way to get of it. However,
they seem to have little luck in a fisher's hut where they actually do find
alive adults ... but the kids are close behind. Ultimately their way only
leads them back to the main village of the island, where Tom really wants to
make it count by running over the kids, but pregnant Evelyn just can't let him
do it and instead crashed the car, which leaves them with no alternative but
to lock themselves into the police station, where Tom has to shoot a boy, no
more than 5, in self-defense ... whereupon Evelyn totally loses it, thinks her
unborn baby wants to kill her from the inside, miscarrries and dies in the
process. Now Tom is really hellbent, and he guns down the cute kiddies by
the dozen with a machine gun he has found at the police station, and when he
has run out of ammo, he tries to smacsh their heads with his gun ... When a
policeboat arrives, and the cops (understandably) mistake him for a madman
with a predilection for killing children, and they have to shoot hi ... Of
course, the kids soon decide to overcome the cops too, and take their boats
to go to mainland Spain ... As you might have noticed, this film (or
rather the novel it was based on) was later blatantly ripped off by Stephen King
for his much blunter (but much more successful) short story Children of the
Corn (which was later made into a movie series), though the
sources for both this story and King's rip-off can be traced back much
further, an earlier version was the Star Trek
episode Miri (1966, directed by Vincent McEveety), but quite possibly it all goes back to
the H.G.Wells story Country of the Blind (at least in its underlying
topic). This film itself is interesting but not without major flaws, the main
one being that it takes simply ages to kick into gear, a very long prologue
that shows our lead couple getting to the island contributes nothing to the
film, and several suspense scenes are simply played out way too long, so that
one actually tends to lose interst in its outcome. Only the final quarter of
the movie, that has our heroes being chased by incredibly cute children, does
really catch the attention of the audience.
|