Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Who Can Kill A Child?


Cast: Lewis Fiander, Prunella Ransome, Bunch Of Annoying Spanish Brats

Synopsis: An English couple decides to take their vacation on a remote island which has no contact to the mainland and with no idea who lives there, where they'll stay or why on Earth they don't just find a quiet village on the mainland like any other normal vacationing couple only to find that the island is all but deserted save for the occasional snotty little vicious kids, a bunch of corpses and a creepy looking Spanish dude rocking an awesome 'tache.


Review: The idea of the film is simple: A group of kids on an isolated island decided for reasons unknown to up and kill all the adults and take the island as their own. The adults could have easily overpowered the children but didn't because... (dun dun DUN!)... who can kill a child? A nice premise and one that surely could be thought provoking and deep in a "let's discuss it over a few pints while we all get shit faced and laugh about the piss poor special effects" kind of way if the film hadn't begun with about ten minutes of lengthy tedious intro voice-over telling us that there have been hundreds of instances during man's inhumanity to man (Wars, famine etc etc.) where the kids, either inadvertently or deliberately, are the first and the most plentiful to be killed. So the film basically shot itself in the ass from the get go on that one

Who can kill a child?

All these people can and did

Oh...

The end!

Instead we follow a couple of fairly obnoxious English people as they trek through the island contemplating their own failed existence and wondering when the silly bitch is going to realize that she should just let her husband brandish the biggest Gatling gun available and plow through the hordes of snotty pre-teens like it was a ridiculous 'Nam movie shot by Michael Bay.

I think this movie had some real potential - it could have had the creepy kid element, it could have been a real gut-wrnecher as far as the kid killing was concerned and it had the isolation down but I feel overall the movie fell way short of it's potential...


In Short: Worth a watch? Sure, but don't get excited just because it got an X rating in Britain and was banned in Finland. I dunno what that means, for all I know Bambi is banned in Finland...


Biggest Positive: The realistic language barrier. You half expect the main guy to just start yelling at the "crazy foreigners" when they start to struggle with words... wait, that's my biggest positive? That sucks... oh well


Biggest Negative: It's hard to watch without thinking how much creepier, scarier, gorier, better it could have been no matter how much you enjoy it...


IMDb Page


Trivia: The spanish word for A-Bomb is "bomba atómica"


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The large part at the beginning about how children are the hardest hit during wars and what not... I believe they put that there as a reason that the kids were revolting. See, children are a totally different species. They eat boogers and drink copious amounts of sugar to survive. They know the only way to save themselves from the evils of war is to kill all adults. Obviously.

Spike Vicious said...

That would make sense...
It would then sort of contradict the implication later on that it's some sort of weird hypno-infection though.

And I wouldn't say those paticular kids were in any sort of situation (at least that we saw) that would cause them to "defend" themselves but I see your point, that was probably the directorial point in the intro

Anonymous said...

I killed four this morning.

Tifu said...

I think these themes were actually dealt with in a BBC drama several years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNIeXIaVnA8