Suggested Title: “A Funny Thing Happened to Our Porno Script”
Tatonka Rating: 4.0
Director: Max Kalmanowicz
Writers: Carlton J. Albright, Edward Terry
Theme Song: The product of what must have been the most annoying string recording session ever, with extra violins.
Starring: A general “Who’s Who” of Hollywood nobodies. Only one of the actors has a head shot in IMDB, and his only acting jobs post The Children were in Law and Order episodes almost 30 years later, proving that anyone’s dad could’ve scored a part in this film.
Suggested Tagline(s): “Gettin’ Huggy with It;” “Don’t Get All Handsy with Me”
Actual Tagline(s): “... thank God they're somebody else's!”
“Something terrifying has happened to the children... pray you never meet them!”
“It only takes five to hold a town in TERROR.”
Plot Summary: A group of vacant-eyed kids are on a school bus in Ravensback, a small New England town, riding home from school on a typical day, and they go missing. A Sheriff named Billy Hart, who looks like Dennis Hopper meets Jim Nabors somehow misses a thousand obvious clues while hunting down the cause of their disappearance. Plot spoiler? The kids have turned into delightfully murderous zombies, thanks to exposure to a gas leak at the local nuclear power plant.
Trailer:
The Other Trailer:
(Spoiler Alert) The Children is a horror romp with a slowly-unraveling plot. It takes its humble first steps with stock footage and innocuous conversation – sprinkled with light blue collar humor – that largely fails to hint at an impending Chernobyl-style disaster, between two nuclear power plant workers, shot from afar, identified in the credits as “Slim” and “Jim.”
Slim: “I checked the intake and the outflow.”
Jim: “Maybe there really was a pressure drop.”
Slim: “And maybe they really will pay us overtime.”
As we watch noxious gas begin to creep from a pipe, we fade to a bus scene. Never have “99 Bottles of Beer” and “Here’s to the Bus Driver” been so ominous as here, when they are sung by children that have oddly hybrid Boston/Long Island accents. The bus rambles through the woods, and we see pregnant mother Cathy Freemont wave to it before it disappears into the toxic gas cloud.
We skip to a deserted road, where short-shorts, high-heel-wearing farmer’s daughter Suzie and Deputy "Rapey O’Toole," whose real name is Harry, played by the infamous Tracy Griswold talk about traffic suggestively while determining if they have enough chromosomes to one day responsibly mate.
The movie shifts again to pill pusher and lesbian co-mom Dr.-of-What(?) Joyce Gould (played by Michelle La Mothe), who spends her days in the company of her Doberman and her cellulite, sunbathing in weather-worn white bikinis. While her relationship to Ms. Button (one of the children, Tommy Button’s bat-shit-eating-crazy mothers) is unclear, she shields her from life’s truths with copious amounts of prescription drugs and soothing piano music. Here we are introduced to the investigative prowess of Sheriff Billy Hart, who brings an overly-pissy Dr. Gould with him to check out the empty bus, filled only with leftover school books and the bus driver’s fishing hat. From these clues, he is able to deduce that the bus driver and children are missing.
We cut back awkwardly to Deputy Harry, still with Suzie, who answers his police radio while approaching first base and says, “Nothing’s gone by us here” when asked if he’d seen the school bus or any other traffic. We have to trust his report, considering the foreplay to his failed barn kiss with Suzie was to talk about the lack of traffic in the town.
We cut without warning for the third time back to Dr. Gould searching for Tommy frantically near the bus after Sheriff Hart leaves her to go cock block his deputy. The vehicle is abandoned eerily in front of a cemetery, which makes our first sight of black-fingernailed, Goth Club ready Tommy even more impactful. Dr. Gould sees Tommy and chases after him, tripping over the burnt-out shell of the bus driver. She also gives us our first visible death scene via the “Hug of Death,” delivered by a male tween in a striped polo, and thwarts our expectations that she will be a main character. As he hugs his ornery second mom right into her grisly, burning death, his eyes are believably lifeless, potentially because he was already dead inside, or simply was given LSD during filming so he wouldn’t be weirded out by having to hug a bunch of girls from whom he might contract serious cooties.
And now, some quick FAQs about the gas-induced hugging disease:
How is it contracted?
It is airborne, but only for a limited time and in limited areas. It comes from unidentified gas produced by nuclear power plants.
Is it contagious?
It’s deadly, but not contagious.
Will it live on?
Apparently it will, but only in children that contract it in-utero when their mothers drive through a cloud. It probably was supposed to produce a sequel film, but that didn’t work out so well.
After the first visible death, we get a delicious taste of the Plaid Ginger Twins, Hank and Frank, who are both balding fans of plaid and denim shirts. They introduce us to the small-town charm of the corner store that buys roadkill, especially dead birds from townspeople and sells things like ether and other confusing auto repair supplies. The store is staffed by the saucy, NRA-card-carrying grandma, Molly. The “that’s what she said” conversation between Molly and the brothers further shows us that the writers of the script were really aiming to make an adult film, but somehow the kids got in the way.
Hank/Frank (about the birds they’re selling): “If you want ‘em any bigger, you’re going to have to wait a couple months. This is as big as they are right now.”
Molly also has access to a CB radio, presumably so she can boff truckers on their way through town and also keep tabs on the admittedly senile school bus driver.
Next on the agenda is for Sheriff Billy to visit one of the other children, Janet’s mother. Dee Dee Shore, played by an actress whose only other role was a hooker in a different movie also filmed in 1980, has hobbies that include sunbathing topless on overcast, chemically-polluted days and watching her heavily-mustachioed boyfriend Jack lift weights by the pool in a grey Speedo that perfectly matches his ashy skin. He gets visibly winded holding up his giant, oiled torso, and angrily turns down a cigarette from Dee Dee while calling into question the not-so-thinly-veiled message Sheriff Hart is delivering: “Exactly what are you trying to tell us Sheriff?” The prospect of a kidnapping inappropriately excites Dee Dee, who exclaims, “A kidnapping in Ravensback! Oh Jack, how exciting!” In an attempt to deflect the twisted nature of the situation, Hart strikes up a conversation about an art “piece” he finds and many awkward silences ensue.
We are introduced to one of the main characters, John Freemont, a father of two of the “Children” and owner of a regularly-broken car. As he waits for Sheriff Hart to help fix his car, girl zombie in a fuscia jumper, Ellen looks on from the trees, but is forced to delay her attack.
Ellen takes real pleasure in her work:
One of the skills of this movie is to switch between sex and death awkwardly with zero transition. After Ellen kills both her parents, we cut to the Ginger Twins spying on Harry and Suzie. They talk about how pretty her hair is, likely eying it as potential stuffing for future pillows. While the purpose of this scene seems to be to give the writers an excuse to wax philosophical about hand jobs with homoerotic overtones, it is really to introduce a character that serves no future purpose in the film. Enter a man in a Pimpmobile, who may or may not be Terry Kiser, but is definitely styling with his giant car phone. He is there to see Dee Dee Shore and her boyfriend.
When Dee Dee’s name is mentioned, Hank and Frank, now the official Greek Chorus of this movie say,
Hank: “I’d like to hump that bitch.”
Frank: “Well, you’d have to take her on your own then.”
Hank: “I’d take her on my own.”
At this point, Suzie dies at the hands of her brother, Paul. Initially, we think she might get away, since in her only perceptive moment she finds his incessant attempts to hug her inappropriately out of character and starts to slap him repeatedly. Unfortunately, the spinning bike tire and gurgling scream tell us Suzie is dead. Paul then kills his before-now-not-introduced father.
The magic really happens when Harry finds three children in the darkness and tells Molly over the CB radio, “Hey, hey, hey. Harry the Hawk does it again” right before he alliteratively gets hugged to death. Billy comes across his lifeless body and morphs into full-on Gomer Pyle in order to more appropriately display his grief over the situation.
Now there are officially feral children on the loose, but Sheriff Hart’s fear of dogs is what almost prevents him from going in to check on Dr. Gould at the Button house. The only thing more horrifying than finding burnt, dead bodies on the scene is that the phones are dead.
The next stop is back to Molly’s store. She provides us a new twist on an old expression when Hart bangs on her door, presumably because she is used to warding off the gentleman callers she phone sexes via short wave: “Alright, keep your pants zipped!” She makes a loose and fast promise to protect herself by adding, “Anyone tries to get in here, I’ll blast their ass to kingdom come!”
Having still not put together the very conspicuous pieces of the mysterious “The Children” puzzle, Sheriff Hart and John Freemont join forces and find a missing child, Janet on the highway, who thankfully for them is not feeling very affectionate. They repeat her name 100 times, thus turning her into the most well-developed character in the movie.
Then, the death toll really mounts … again.
The film picks up additional steam when bodybuilding, eye-candied Jack dies. Thankfully, his death is more dignified than his life, as he is found lounging by the pool wearing a nice dress shirt and slacks. The death of Jack’s amazing mustache – the only thing left on his burnt carcass that is recognizable – finally helps John and Billy discover that Janet and her friends are part of the problem rather than the solution.
And now, a still from the moments before Molly’s very anticlimactic death:
After the sad demise of the town’s only badass grandma, we cut to a scene in which an adult is slowly killing a child, as we see pregnant Cathy Freemont smoking, with apologies to her baby. Since – spoiler alert – the baby ends up being infected in the end, perhaps the whole movie is a PSA against exposure of children to toxins of any kind.
When Billy and John arrive at the Freemont home, going through major caffeine withdrawal, they demand that Cathy make them coffee. At this point, Goth-nail-infected Freemont daughter Jenny attempts to break into her own house. Cathy almost gets the hugging of a lifetime, but the hug is brutally rebuked. John and the Sheriff start to wrangle the children into the barn/tool shed, and John learns the hard lesson that you should never hug a child that’s gone full Goth when his hand is singed by touching Jenny. A barrage of threatening hug attempts ensue as all the zombie children rally.
Billy sets up a firing-squad-style shooting post inside the Freemont house, but the children are immune to the blasts. They are also apparently excellent climbers, and start to try to invade the Freemont house to hug the crap out of their families. A game of hide and seek goes horribly wrong as yet another Freemont child, Clarkie, starts to kill …
but gets ass-blasted in dramatic fashion over the railing of the stairs. At this point, we discover the Achilles Heel of the infected: cutting off their hands cuts off the disease and also kills them.
Likely this movie was an excuse to satisfy the urge to kill child actors without the authorities being alerted. The fact that these young actors and actresses completely disappeared from show biz after this could be more than just a career side effect of starring in this.
“God … if they get those hands on you!”
Giving up any hope of salvaging the movie, the writers decide to make their characters adopt a passive aggressive stance on solving the problem of the zombie kids by having them propose waiting it out and seeing what happens, echoing our sentiments about what we might be able to do after watching this film to erase it from our memories: “Maybe it will just go away.” However, like the characters and also the actors, we know we will never get that hour and thirty minutes of our lives back.
While debating, they manage to cut off the hands of Ellen, the girl that had the most unquenchable bloodlust. The end of the movie is a series of flashlight scenes, interspersed with John’s conflicted feelings about filicide. He almost succumbs to the power of his daughter’s high-waisted khakis (Jenny is truly ahead of her time in the fashion department, as such pants were not seen in their full glory until the early 1990’s). As she advances on him in her zombie hug stance, he is saved by the Sheriff, who systematically kills the children in the shed one-by-one.
Unfortunately, losing one “Huggy Hand” does not fully kill Ellen, and she delivers the final death blow of the movie to Sheriff Hart from the backseat of his police cruiser, bringing about the untimely end of one of the most majestic movie bromances of all time.
John is distracted from his corpse-holding grief by the cries of Cathy from inside the house. The baby is being born, bringing about the swelling of the violin-heavy string theme again. He finds her in the bathroom, and she starts to list the usual laundry list of items – boiling water, sheets, scissors – you’d think you’d need to carry out a successful home birth, even though she does not use any of them in the end. As the sun rises, the true horror of the film unfolds as the creepy sounds of Cathy giving birth that are likely indistinguishable from what conceiving it sounded like fill the house.
John exclaims, “The head’s clear! You did it, Cathy!” And the baby is born – a girl … with Gothy fingernails.
The moral of the story? If your kids die, you can always have some more; but they might turn to the Goth lifestyle to fill the emptiness you created when you told them they failed to meet any of your expectations.
Review by Julia Rogers
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