September 22nd, 2003"children ARE evil!"
I've always had a sneaky suspicion that children are evil. How else can you explain all the crying, the temper tantrums, the schoolyard bullying and the "I WANT! I WANT! I WANT!"? Horror filmmakers certainly have seen the potential in making youngsters the villain in their films. This stems from the fact that most of us see children, especially young children, as innocent and unspoiled. And while that plot device seems overused (from 1960's Village Of The Damned, to 1984's Children Of The Corn and so on...) we offer up three "evil child(ren)" movies for an evening of tyke murder. The Omen [1976] introduced us to Damien. He was the Anti-Christ. Yeah, this little guy was Satan's son and he certainly liked to gorily knock-off anyone who got in the way in this and the two sequels that followed (part four had a female villain). Based on the novel by David Seltzer (who also wrote the script) this has high standing couple Gregory Peck and Lee Remick slowly finding out that their son is quite evil and is using his powers to kill off people close to them. It turns out they need seven ancient daggers to stop him. Along with The Exorcist this was considered one of the better religious themed horror flicks of the 70s and while it doesn't reach the peak of the aformentioned 1973 hit it's still an entertaining film with lots of "shock" deaths and a fairly smart script. The mayhem would get even more gruesome in 1978 with the sequel, Damien:Omen II. Bloody Birthday [1980] sat on the shelf until 1986 before being released by Prism Entertainment (many of us 80's children will remember this company for their constant outpouring of really bad B-movies such as Teen Alien, Vice Academy and Night Eyes) and probably only then got some "oomph!" from the fact parody comedian Julie Brown was in it (and naked no less). Close to their tenth birthday three best friends (two boys, one girl) go on a murderous spree. Turns out they were all born during a lunar eclipse which makes them evil incarnate and quite ready to kill, kill, kill! This one is certainly entertaining and manages to be better written than I expected. Plus the fact that it's a bunch of tykes doing the killing tends to put a morbid smile on my face also. My favourite moments here have to be the Julie Brown strip tease and when our little moppets lock a neighbourhood kid in an abandoned fridge (I remember the big "public service announcement" push in the 80s about that). Finally we get to the Troma distributed, Beware: Children At Play [1989], which is tedious and cheaply made and really not that good unless you place your finger on the fast-forward button and get to the final reel where all the adults gorily slaughter the evil children. Religious themed script has a small town's children disappearing in the woods only to show-up later transformed into tiny killing machines who kidnap the towns kids and adults and proceed to murder them. Along comes a mob of angry parents who do all the loving carnage we've fast-forwarded to see. This sucks. Though it is nice to see a film taboo ("you don't kill children on screen") so blatantly ignored. |
