You don’t have to look to hard to detect the influence of George A. Romero on Max Kalmanowicz’s The Children, which plays like The Village of the Damned (1960) by way of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Sadly that runs the risk of making it sound a lot more exciting than it actually is.
In the New England town of Ravensback, an accident at a chemical plant causes a toxic yellow cloud to escape and envelop a school bus carrying children home at the end of the day. The five children left on the bus disappear, only to return some time later with blackened fingernails and the ability to kill anyone they hug, causing their victims’ flesh to burn and mutate. Sheriff Billy Hart (Gil Rogers) leads the search for the rest of the missing children who are soon roaming the streets of Ravensback killing anyone they stumble upon. One of the father’s John Freemont (Martin Shakar, previously the priest older brother of John Travolta’s Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977)), his pregnant wife Cathy (Gale Garnett), their youngest son Clarkie (Jessie Abrams) and Hart take refuge in the Freemont home as the five children circle outside looking for a way in.
The Children doesn’t have much of a story to tell but it takes an awful long time to tell it anyway and much of it makes no sense at all. The opening is intriguing – a school bus drives into a mysterious fog bank and is discovered abandoned by the local sheriff, the engine still running but no sign of the driver or kids. But sadly the mystery of what happened to them is solved rather too quickly and once we’ve seen the killer kids in action the film has played its trump card and has nowhere else to go. And so it settles down into a samey and repetitive, by-the-numbers chiller that never quite makes good on what little promise it had.
After a long plod through a script that makes a half-hearted stab at recreating the siege scenario of The Birds (1963) and Night of the Living Dead, The Children – which was also released as The Children of Ravensback – stumbles to a feeble twist ending that anyone with half a brain could have predicted the minute they found out that Cathy was pregnant. And no, it doesn’t make any sense either…
After too long confined to grotty VHS releases, subsequent DVDs have revealed a much better made film that might at first seem. It’s nicely shot by Barry Abrams, who also shot the same year’s Friday the 13th, and the score is by another Crystal Lake camper Harry Manfredini. The script, by Carlton J. Albright and Edward Terry, is the major liability, full of dull characters reciting clunky dialogue and genuinely new ideas are in short supply. The script offers no rationale for the cutting off of the children’s hands to kill them – it’s just something that happens for no particularly good reason – nor for most of the other incidentals, like the black fingernails nor indeed what it is that’s driving the children to kill their parents.
Craig Lyman’s make-up effects are pretty awful too (Lyman went on to enjoy a career working on much more impressive film and television) and it’s clear that the money simply wasn’t there to sustain them. After the first couple of meltdown hug effects, the rest of the killings take place off camera. The kids themselves are often awkward on screen, some unable to resist the urge to stare straight at the camera. And crucially, they’re just not all that scary – black fingernails, pasty faces and a stiff-legged gait are all they’ve got really and the threat of being hugged to death doesn’t really seem all that scary, even if that hug does cause your flesh to melt.
Kalmanowicz was primarily a sound recordist and boom operator, a career he pursued either side of The Children, though never managing to find work on anything of any real note. He only directed one other film, the astral projection comedy horror Dreams Come True in 1984 (in which two characters go to the cinema to watch The Children) which isn’t a lot better than this. Writer Carlton J. Albright wrote and directed Luther the Geek in 1989 and produced Dreams Come True while Terry gave up writing, appeared as The Freak in Luther the Geek and hasn’t been heard from since.
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