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Movie:		8.0
Picture:		7.0
Sound:		8.0
Extras:		7.0
Score:		8.0

Director(s):	Tom Shankland
Writer(s):	Paul Andrew Williams and Tom Shankland
Starring:	Eva Birthistle • Stephen Campbell Moore • Rachel Shelley • Hannah Tointon • Jeremy Sheffield • Raffiella Brooks • William Howes • Jake Hathaway
Genre:	Horror
Website:	http://www.thechildrenmovie.com/
Release Date:	October 06, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	DVD - $13.99
Amazon:

I wanted to hate this movie, I really did; in fact, the first thing I did before I even watched the thing was brainstorm some high-larious jokes regarding the hokey tag line, which solemnly reads, "You brought them into this world...they'll take you out." How pleased I was with myself, chuckling quietly as I armed myself with a veritable battalion of besmirching, scathingly funny material. What a fool I was. All of that haughty posturing quickly slipped away after I got about half an hour into the film and was promptly DROP-KICKED IN THE FACE WITH NAUSEA-INDUCING TERROR.

We're all familiar with the concept of creepy killer kids. It's done entirely too often (Joshua, The Good Son, Orphan, Children of the Corn, Village of the Damned) and only rarely is it done well (The Bad Seed, The Omen, Pet Sematary). Luckily, The Children manages to hold up amongst the best, presenting itself as a stylish and original horror film that is as pretty to look at as it is terrifying.

The premise is basic enough: a couple of affluent nuclear families decide to get away to the countryside for Christmas, expecting a quiet, uneventful week with their loved ones. There's the requisite yuppie couple, consisting of the uptight Chloe (Rachel Shelley) and older-but-I'm-still-cool Robbie (Jeremy Sheffield), as well as their generically cute kids Nicky (Jake Hathaway) and Leah (Raffiella Brooks). Their friends, Elaine (Eva Birthistle) and Jonah (Stephen Campbell Moore), come to visit them in their country home along with their children, Paulie (William Howes) and Miranda (Eva Sayer). And of course there's the requisite rebellious teen character, Elaine's daughter Casey (Hannah Tointon), obviously standing in for this film's intended demographic. The fact that her birth was an accident becomes a recurring theme throughout the film, and Shankland uses it well; he doesn't resort to using the event as a cop-out to give the character the illusion of depth. Rather, he incorporates her experience into her persona, weaving the implications of said experience seamlessly into the film.

The first half hour lulls the viewer into a false sense of security, making us think that this is going to be just another run of the mill slasher. However, once the kids start contracting and infecting one another with the deadly virus, they turn homicidal, and the shift is unbelievably disturbing. One by one, they dispatch the adults in increasingly gruesome and twisted ways, with Casey initially being the only one able to spot the drastic personality changes the kids undergo.

This isn't a film that relies on cheap scares and sharp musical accents to keep your attention; its creeping dread runs deeper than that. Shankland holds a steady, nauseating tension throughout, anticipation pulled taut by the morose tone and genuinely eerie atmosphere. The violence is so realistic you have to fight the urge to cover your eyes; at least I did, and I'm pretty desensitized to the whole genre. At least I thought I was. The thing is, it isn't always necessary to be super original in order to succeed, or in this case, in order to entertain. Sure, the isolated cabin in the woods setting has been done innumerable times before, but if you can use it to your advantage and do it well at that, then you don't really need to go out of your way in order to come up with any sort of ostentatious, over the top concept. Simplicity works fantastically when you manage to perfect it. From there you can feel free to embellish, to add your own little touches, and make the film your own. Shankland follows this formula downright perfectly, interspersing scenes of gory killings with moments of subtle beauty; a close-up of a droplet of wine creeping between the slats of a wooden table just before the characters discover a bloody body, though making the symbolism painfully obvious, is rather lovely.

DVD Bonus Features

There's a bevy of making-of features on this disc, including a short documentary about the general production, a mini-doc about shooting on location in the countryside, a mini doc on Tom Shankland's "On-Set Lair", another mini-doc that features Paul Hyett talking about prosthetics, and yet another on the snowy set design, which actually looks uncannily realistic on film. There's also a trailer gallery, deleted scenes, and some needless metal music videos by Black Light Burns, Warbringer, Winds of Plague, and others.