Take it from someone who's worked with kids all her life, there's nothing quite as creepy as an evil little kid movie. Some people have an idealized view of children, thinking them totally pure and innocent, but I've seen toddlers bite each other in the face and split each other's heads open with heavy toys when they don't get their way. Even given such violence, some people still insist that little kids are born innocent and only learn how to be evil from adults, or they blame such violence on television or society, but it's pretty clear (at least to me) that when kids are younger they don't have the capacity for empathy to care about much beyond getting their way, and sometimes this gets taken to the extreme. This isn't to say I don't love kids, but I don't idealize them, I realize the potential for evil within them, thus movies like this both frustrate and scare the shit out of me.

Things start off innocuously enough. A man and his very pregnant wife are enjoying their time together, the sun and beaches and parties until they take their boat out and get themselves docked on a distant island that seems to be deserted. Instead of leaving immediately like any sane person would do, they start exploring. The woman seems to be a kind of old-fashioned June Cleaver wife who is excited about her baby and husband and doesn't seem to be the brightest bulb on the tree (witness how she relies on her husband to tell her what's going on even up to more than halfway through the movie when it's clear that she's seen that bad things are going on). The husband isn't a bad guy but we get the idea that he's passive and not much of a fighter (hence whispering most of his dialogue). This seems to be the trend with 70s exploitation horror movies; the men (and women, but most noticeably the men) are passive and meek until thrown into a horrible situation wherein they have to defend themselves against horrible and unthinkable circumstances.

You'd think (or at least I would think) that the second horrible things like this even hinted at happening, I'd be hauling ass to where I left my boat and getting the hell out of there, but these geniuses don't do that. Instead the wife screams at the husband to tell her what happened (when she saw most of it herself) and the husband whispers lies (as though keeping the truth from her is helpful in any way) and so it begins. I noticed in other movies of this ilk that the women are treated as delicate and unable to handle reality (and that's not a feminist rant, most of the time the women in such films are very passive and meek and weaker than women are today, at least in films) and that adds to the tension, because we have a woman who's acting pretty weak and indeed apart from that, her condition DOES make her weak because she looks to be about to give birth at any second, so it's not like she can just book it out of there or fight very well on her own, and she's got Wimpy McPassive for a husband, so he can't do much to keep them from being killed.

The situation is bleak. And then more and more of the children begin to show up, and most of them don't look menacing, in fact it's their smiling faces as they surround and attack their prey that make them even more terrifying. They often laugh and play like children playing a game while they're maiming and killing. Except for the bulk of the movie we don't see much killing, it's all off camera, and that is bothersome ad I wondered if the movie would have the balls to show any of the carnage onscreen (don't worry, it does, finally, and the scenes are sick enough it make it worth the wait when it finally happens). The human mayhem and killings and chase scenes are tense and frightening when they happen, but the movie has some deeper things on its mind. Central to the plot, when the plot itself is finally revealed, is the idea that the children in this village suddenly decided one day to ignore their parents and start doing whatever they wanted. They don't fear adults because they know that they outnumber the adults, and as one character says, “We saw what was happening but we did nothing... for who can kill a child?”

Now here I'm screaming “ME! I can! If they're being evil and killing me, sorry Charlie, those brats are going down!” but i do understand why people would hesitate to hurt children, and thus is the quandary of the film. In fact the film opens with scenes of the Holocaust and the Korean war and many other times where children were discounted and cast aside as worthless, reminding us as viewers that our world hasn't always taken the highest moral stance where children are concerned. Being small and helpless, children often bear the brunt of their parents' and other adults' anger and rage, so seeing them fight back like this shouldn't be so surprising. Except it is. The movie is right, people shrink away from the idea of killing a child even if that child is doing horribly violent things, so if large numbers of children started revolting like this, carnage would ensue. And the children look out for each other and care for each other, they don't brutalize each other, it's the adults they can't seem to stand. It's you and me. And they're out there, waiting for us. Any flaws this movie may have aside, that conclusion alone is terrifying, and the central conflict is played quite well. Seeing the smiling face of a child laughing as he or she tears an adult body to pieces is something that will haunt my dreams for long after this movie ends.

Whoever decided it would be a good idea for the lead actor to whisper his dialogue throughout most of the film needs to be dropped on an island full of these kids ad punishment. It's impossible to hear what he's saying half the time, and since the woman screams most of her dialogue in a shrill voice, so it's not like you can just turn the sound up, because then your eardrums will be blown out. The result is a very frustrating experience (especially in the last 30 minutes, when they decide to switch and the woman whispers while the man screams).

Seeing smiling children violently surrounding, attacking, and killing people is tough to watch, and when it's off-screen it's frustrating but then when it starts happening onscreen you almost wish for the off-screen deaths again. I've seen a lot of negative reviews for this movie but I honestly can't see why people deride it, it's taut and chilling and thought-provoking and everything I want from a horror movie, in spite of its flaws.