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johnny@allthingshorror.co.uk

The Children

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'Make us tidy our room Mum, and we'll kill you...'

Forget The Village of the Damned. Forget The Shining or even The Omen. The prize for the scariest film containing kids goes to The Children, a horror film directed by Tom Shankland. Building on the groundwork laid down by recent films such as Eden Lake and Outpost, The Children is showing that the UK Horror film industry is slowly clawing its way back into the nightmares of the British populace.

The Children follows two familes who get together for Christmas. Surrounded by the beautiful snow-ladened countryside they have some laughs; they talk about lovely middle class things such as home schooling and smoke some undoubtedly middle class pot in the greenhouse. The problem arises when one of the kids become violently sick and turns almost trance-like. The parents put it down to a bad case of car-sickness. It ain't long before all four children become severely ill and the film takes the expected, but no less shocking twist when they turn on the four adults (and one teenage girl) with a savagery that is genuinely creepy.

The film is taboo-busting in the respect that it does not flinch for one second in its mission - and some of the set pieces are truly uncomfortable to watch. The acting all round is good - though I feel that the director should have told the kids he was going to kill their pets in front of them...to evoke some proper crying - which sounded and looked a little forced at times. I recognised a couple of faces from the small screen which is good as there is some talent and it doesn't decend into the hellish embarrasment of something like the banal Beyond the Rave.

SFX wise - there are some very traumatic looking bodily intrusions and modifications and the effects guys should rightly be applauded for the pen in the eyeball - bringing back fond memories of Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters, and also the peeled back scalp which was wide open for an homage to Peter Jackson's Bad Taste - sadly they didn't go for it!

More time could have been spent building up the characters, and there could have been more made of the burgeoning distrust between the two sets of parents before the film decends into The Brood on acid. The film plays well though and is very enjoyable but nearly throws it away in the last twenty seconds when I wanted to throw the remote at the telly. I can see why they went for the ending that they did - it wraps the film up of course, but surely there must have been alternate endings they were thinking about? *

In summary, The Children is an often harrowing and genuinely terrifying film and with its unflinching attitude towards killing children on screen, it pisses over that which Eden Lake feared to tread, and makes the best British horror film of the last few years.

The extras include a good feature documentary, snippets from the special effects guy, and a little video diary from Shankland himself, shacked up in his hotel room, killing a child... (only joking).

8/10

available on DVD from the 30th March.

* JUST WATCHED THE DELETED SCENES - AND THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE ENDING - WHICH IF SPED UP A LITTLE WOULD HAVE BEEN AN IMPROVEMENT.
 BUT WHAT DO I KNOW, I BUGGER UP FILMING THE FAMILY...

children dvd