The first eight minutes of this movie are archival footage of Auschwitz concentration camp, the India-Pakistan partition, the Korean War, the civil war in Biafra, and the Vietnam war with a focus on the damage done to children. I am so serious when I say please be aware before you begin. Content Warning: concentration camp footage, medical experimentation, malnourished/starving children, amputees, war footage, self-immolation, napalm-burned children, child death
Weirdly, nothing else in the movie lives up to the real-life horror shown over the opening credits. Everything else is just red paint. The "dead bodies" even breathe. We are not talking a commitment to realism here.
British tourists Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) are vacationing on the coast of Spain. They decide to visit a locals-only island only to discover the island's children have collectively murdered all the adults.
I absolutely hate to give Stephen King any credit but Children of the Corn is a much better execution of this concept. I have no idea what point the filmmakers here were trying to achieve. The opening credits are about how children are unintentional (or purposeful) casualties in adult conflicts with grim footage and stats, but the movie is children killing maliciously which would seem to undercut the opening. Are they innocent victims or cold-blooded perpetrators? It seems like it's trying to be anti-war but it forces Tesco-brand-Donald-Sutherland to use violence to survive.
Also, this movie weirdly fetishizes children as 'not people' which I will chalk up to its time period. Kids are also human beings. They're just smaller with less general life experience. A toddler with a gun can still kill you just as dead as an adult, so this idea that they're somehow paragons of innocence conflates ignorance with moral purity. I'm just saying, nobody who ever baby-sat wrote this script. I don't know that they've ever even seen a child except in books.
Somehow this is a cult classic that is praised by critics. Fortunately, it's really easy to avoid by not being available on any streaming services.
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