The Children
The Children is The Children of the Corn minus the corn. Whereas in The Children of the Corn the children are possessed by a malevolent demon who resides in the corn and forces them to murder adults, The Children are turned into zombies from a cloud of radioactive mustard-gas, which causes them to murder anyone they come across with radioactive bear hugs – and they couldn’t care less about funny it looks, either. The Children is by far the most unintentionally hilarious movie I have ever seen. The movie opens with a leak at a nuclear power-plant that is not fixed by two incompetent workers. They decide to have a beer after work, which might as well be gasoline considering the magnitude of manure that is about to descend on this town and blot out the sun. After a prologue like that the movie thinks I want to know who’s in it, and the credits roll. A school bus takes some kids home, a ride that will end as no other in cinematic history and most certainly never occur again. The children are singing 99 bottles of Beer (again!) so loudly that I can sympathize with any act of sabotage the bus driver might have previously committed that is now, unknown to me, set in motion. As the wheels on the bus go round the rhymes of other abominable songs, a woman drives by and waves just before she as well as the bus drives through a cloud of yellow gas that appears to have ambushed them. It would be a hard thing to miss. Meanwhile Sheriff Hart, who will be as close to a hero as anything The Children has to offer, drives by one of his deputies, a man named Harry, parked at a barn and flirting with a girl named Suzy at a fruit stand. She is on the side of the road and does not travel far from the farm to sell the watermelons and tomatoes the farm supposedly grows, which makes me wonder why the farm doesn’t sell an all-you-can-eat subscription and just let people come and pick the fruit at their leisure. The deputy asks her if she is home alone right after her father drove by on a tractor and addressed that very question by saying he’ll be gone until supper time, presumably ploughing something the deputy will not. The Sheriff meanwhile comes upon the school bus, parked on the side of the road and with the door open; however, not the emergency door, which should make the Sheriff sigh with relief that whatever vacated the bus wasn’t as serious as all that. The bus is entirely empty of children and the bus driver as well, also still running, but the Sheriff sees nothing so amiss as not to smile about this and continue on. As the Sheriff drives away – he sees no reason to report this – I notice that the bus is parked by a cemetery, so perhaps the titular children were on a field trip there, unless there is another faction of children that has already dispatched completely the children The Children just introduced me to. Sheriff Hart goes to see Mrs. Buckley and Dr. Gould and ask them about Tommy, who was presumably on the bus. Dr. Gould decides to take a look at the school bus for herself. Sheriff Hart, meanwhile, calls Harry at the watermelon farm, who has not progressed with his objective any more than Hart has with whatever his is. Harry has not seen the bus. He asks Suzy if Paul is home, and Paul isn’t, but the girl didn’t remember about Paul until asked, and thus no one pays enough attention to the comings and goings of these children and I am surprised they are even considered missing and not just thrown away. Dr. Gould looks for Tommy by shouting his name and then she gives up. Sheriff Hart tries to comfort her, and they decide not to tell Leslie, whomever she is, about Tommy’s disappearance. This is not surprising because I only know Tommy third hand, and I don’t like him, and cannot suspend my disbelief that anyone else would either. Tommy, the snake in the grass, has been hiding in the cemetery and calls out to Dr. Gould as soon as Hart drives away. She runs up to him as he darts between tombstones like an ugly son of bitch, then she trips over a mutilated body that sticks out as much as a mutilated body can in a graveyard. Tommy steps up to her and hugs her, enveloping her in the yellow gas that enveloped him, yet it somehow burns her alive whereas it gave Tommy the power to kill people with fraudulent temptations of public displays of affection. Hart then goes to see a woman, who is by a pool without a shirt on and isn’t even tanning her naked breasts because she’s on her side. Hart tells her about the school bus and the missing children. The woman thinks the bus driver Mansfield is a bit senile, and thinks he took them on an impromptu pick nick, having failed to notice that Hart said that he found the school bus by a cemetery. Hart dumps some pot (I believe) in the pool because she is a tease and leaves. In the next scene a man named John’s car breaks down. He flags down Sheriff Hart, who offers him a ride to the Chandler’s. After Hart’s visit, which is deliciously cut out, a woman lies down with a wet-towel on her head – playing sick for a day off – and one of the children approaches her house. The girl is Ellen, and her mother runs out to hug her upon seeing her, perhaps having been inspired to an emotional exuberance by Hart’s warning about the school bus, an exuberance she might not have had thanks to him. The mother is killed with the mustard gas, and then, in a moment that is going to be hard to top, Ellen’s father gapes at the smoldering sack of soot on the floor as if to say “Oh sit. Well, she’s gone. I better find the mailman or I’m next”. I assume he’s hugged to death against his will. Meanwhile Suzy has driven all the way to the road block Hart made Harry set up. She wants a kiss, but Harry won’t give her one, perhaps because there are two hillbillies in the background who look as if they haven’t seen a kiss in decades and couldn’t contain themselves if they did. She peddles back to the farm. Harry has an annoying confrontation with a man named Sanford Butler Jones over the road block. Jones is a snob whom I think makes porno films. Suzy meanwhile goes to a large mansion to deliver some apples to Mrs. Peterson. While looking around the house she comes upon a dog, but the soundtrack makes a noise like a cat, as if the dog was supposed to be a cat but something happened to the cat and then the soundtrack and the movie had different ideas about which was better to include in the movie. She spills all the apples on the stairs and leaves. She goes to another house where Paul holds his arms out for a hug. She calls him a creep and denies him a hug. He keeps coming at her with his arms open, the one and only MO the children will ever have, and she keeps asking him what the matter with him is, even slapping him across the face. Suzy does not want to hug Paul: that is a great certainty. She’s killed off-screen. Her father then walks in and sees Suzy smoldering on the floor and says “Paul! My God!”. I don’t suppose there is an appropriate way to react to what happened, even knowing what it was and that Paul was responsible for it. Paul approaches him with open arms, so I assume he dies as well, despite an even greater reluctance to hug Paul than Suzy had. Meanwhile Hart is visiting with John and his family: his wife, Kathy, and their son Clarkie. Clarkie will play an important role when his time comes. Kathy is also the woman who drove through the mustard gas and feels sick because of it, although she isn’t possessed with a desire to hug people to death just yet, but I’m watching her. John tells Kathy about the school bus, which was by the old cemetery and this implies that there is a new one that is providential and Ravensback will need. Harry drives to the Gould’s, where the school bus has been pulled over to the side of the cemetery and parked along a fence, which someone must have done and more importantly had a reason to. He runs into three children and shouts “Hot damn look at this!”, as if he has never seen children before and had not anticipated children being the results of any of his actions. The screen goes black before I see if he is hugged to death. Hart and John drive towards the Gould place to find Harry, who they have been told has found the children. The lights on Harry’s car, which are still flashing despite his excitement at seeing the children, are not blue like the Sheriff’s, so if you lived in Ravensback you could tell which of the two was pulling you over, and if it was Harry, decide whether or not you wanted to. Hart finds John burned to death in the bushes and gets in a hurry to leave. At the Gould’s, they find a door that isn’t locked and go inside. There they find Leslie, slumped over her piano and burned as if she was hugged with a sneak-attack. They try to use the phone, which is also dead and I damn well hate not seeing the children run around hugging all the telephone poles in town. On the drive back, they find Janet in the middle of the road. John just finished loading his shotgun, but unfortunately he leaves it in the car. They decide to take Janet home because it appears that she is in shock. Once inside the police car, Janet slumps over and falls asleep. They go to Janet’s house, where Hart tells John to find her mother. Inside he is spooked by a mirror before the camera shows it to me. Then he burns himself on a pot cooking lobsters as if he expected that the pot would not be hot. Maybe he thought there was a child in the pot. He goes to the pool and finds Jackson, who falls off a chair he was sitting in and into the pool when John hits him on the shoulder. Jackson has been burned alive too; so badly in fact that, despite my deep knowledge of him from previous scenes, I cannot even tell if it is Jackson or not. Meanwhile Janet wakes up in the backseat and her fingernails turn black, which is I guess the children’s equivalent to growing vampire fangs and thirsting for hugs. I assume John finds Sanderson, and I miss seeing him die. Janet tries to touch Hart, who slaps her hand away and she falls out of the car. Kathy is at home making tea while another child, perhaps her daughter, is slowly walking up to the house. After a woman on a radio calls Hart and is audibly killed by the children, John and Hart look at one another as if wondering who is going to break the uncomfortable ice that the children are the killers who have been burning everyone, and the even more unpleasant task of explaining how. Kathy watches TV and then decides to have a drink even though she is pregnant. The movie doesn’t show her having a drink, cutting instead to a girl trying to get in from a locked door, but then cuts back to Karen putting four bottles back in the closet so I assume she poured something with a wallop. At least she apologizes to the baby, who, considering the children it will have to hang out with, might be better off coming out of the womb a wino. When Hart and John arrive she asks about Jenny, and Hart tells her they did not find her. That the children are perhaps committing murders with hugs, the good Sheriff does not tell her. The phone at John’s is dead too. John tells Kathy that Harry is dead, and when she asks how, Hart looks at John as if to say “Don’t you dare tell her he was burned alive!”, and so John says he was shot, which is obviously a lie, unless he was shot after he was burned alive, but the important thing is that Harry was burned alive. John asks Kathy to make him some coffee, and she asks him for more information. Then John shouts “Make the damn coffee!” and it is so over the top that I have no doubt this little snippet would have made its way into the final stinger at the end of every Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. Hart has been rather wall-eyed since he discovered the dead bodies, so it is hard to gauge his reaction to John’s apparent meltdown. The news of the missing children has somehow reached the local news as well, and Hart and John watch it, although they could hardly learn anything from it since they have experienced almost everything in the movie firsthand. The only people who would know more are the children themselves, and they certainly haven’t reported anything to the news. The girl outside is still having difficulty getting inside the house. She has not figured out yet that if she knocks someone will answer and open the door. While Kathy is pouring the damn coffee she looks out of the window and recognizes the girl outside, confirming my suspicions that it’s her daughter Jenny whom she has been persistently asking about. She is about to find out everything she wanted to know that John wouldn’t tell her. She opens the door and Jenny holds out her hands and says “Mama.” But John stops Kathy from accepting the deadly hug. Jenny flees faster than I have seen any of the children move hitherto. Hart and John believe they have corralled Jenny in the basement, so they go inside to flush her out. And there Jenny is, sitting down with her arms out and calling for her daddy. John, the fool, goes over to her but Hart holds him back. Jenny still gets a hold of John’s hand and burns it badly. After that Hart and John are on the retreat. When they are a good distance away from Jenny another child flanks them from the right like a Velociraptor. Hart stumbles, turns, and fires his gun at the child the instant he sees him – twice – and this is perhaps the only movie you will ever see that has a uniformed police officer gunning down a ten-year-old, no questions asked, in cold blood and with the ten-year-old’s arms out to hug him no less. Of course the child gets right back up, and by this time Jenny has advanced to them as well. Hart looks back and forth as if deciding which child he wants to shoot first, then remembers that doesn’t work well and possibly looks bad and flees. They go back inside the house. Hart plumps John down in the kitchen and John asks Kathy to get him some damn ice water. It’s bad that even in tremendous pain, John still manages to dish out his habitual disdain for his wife. I don’t blame Kathy for drinking and smoking now. The children meanwhile congregate outside; there are now five of them – perhaps the whole lot– which brings me to a question I’ve had for some time now: how were the children dispersed after the accident, and, for that matter, what happened to the bus driver? All of the death and hugging has not dislodged it from my mind. There have been murders in a lot of different locations, but all in one small town, and all of the murders could have been carried out by two or three children. There are at least four or five children, so what have they been doing? John sticks his hand in a bowl of water and asks Hart if he hit “that kid” he shot. John has lost all nominal respect for the children. Hart says he “couldn’t have missed him”. Take away the fact that these kids are killers and this conversation would have a much darker tone. Hell, it’s dark as it is. While John recuperates and Hart boards up the windows, Kathy goes upstairs and checks on Clarkie, who is fast asleep. And then, as if the on-sight attempted child-murder wasn’t bad enough, Hart snipes the children with a rifle through a window, with Kathy watching as one goes down and then gets back up as if temporarily disabled by a pellet gun. To an outsider it would appear that the house is being bombarded by trick-or-treaters who only want to hug everything in sight, and are in constant expectations of hugs, but are being gunned down for this reason by a Sheriff who will not go outside and read them their rights. Hart is at the window, firing and mumbling “They keep getting’ up”, which is something I dare you to just slap on the TV one day, completely out of context, and write back how your company reacts upon seeing it. Kathy runs up behind him and hits him with a vase of flowers. Hart is out cold, and with an injured John and pregnant Kathy, they are practically defenseless if the children ever figure out how to get inside. Kathy is upset because Hart was shooting the children, failing to notice that the children keep getting up after a bellyful of bullets. John asks her who she thinks burned his hand, and when she says no after he tells her it was Jenny, he says “Yes. Oh, godammnit yes!” John is a reason to watch this movie unto himself. One of the children gets on the roof and scratches on the screen of one of the windows, which wakes Clarkie up although the gunfire and John did not. He sees Paul at the window and decides to let him in. He then hides under the bed for a game of hide-and-seek. Kathy hears Paul walking around upstairs, and perhaps thinking that Paul is Clarkie and that Clarkie is up, realizes it’s not a good time for children to be wandering around with a trigger-happy Sheriff. She goes upstairs, where she finds a shocker: Clarkie is on the floor, unpredictably charred and crisp as if he was executed with an electric chair like a Goonie on The Green Mile. I applaud the guts this movie had to kill Clarkie. This is so horrifying to his mother that she screams with a masculine voice. Hart regains consciousness and arms himself with a Samurai sword; I’m beyond even caring where John got it. Paul comes down the stairs after Kathy, then John pops up with a shotgun he has to prop up on his arm because of his burned hand and blasts Paul in the chest, clean off the stairs and into the air, then over the handrails on onto the floor. Paul gets back up, cornering Kathy as Hart sneaks up behind him and then chops both of his hands off, which also knocks him to the floor again and this time he does not get back up. Hart checks his pulse and discovers that Paul is dead. His fingernails go back to their normal color. Kathy tells John that Clarkie is dead, which makes me wish that Paul had been Jenny instead so that both of their children would be dead and John, maybe, would start to feel bad about something. Kathy apologizes to Hart for hitting him on the head. Hart tries to rationalize what to do after John comes down after putting Clarkie to bed for the last time. He comes up with this: “We’ve got to cut their hands off. That’s where they’re vulnerable!” John tries to convince Kathy that they need to kill Jenny – I suppose John has no feelings – because Jenny is one of “them”. As Hart is reloading the shotgun one of the children sticks her hand through the window but can’t quite reach him, so Hart yells for John to get the sword, which John happily does. John chops her hand off and she falls down, encouraging John to “get them all”. This is one goddamned cold-blooded movie. Hart and John go looking for the other children. Hart opens the cellar door and goes down. He doesn’t find any children so they make their way to a chicken coup, the door coming off completely when Hart tries to open it. There are no children in there, but Hart sees them all heading for the barn. Hart and John go into the barn after them, where Hart finds them with the flashlight as they huddle together in a corner together, pretending to be mere children again as John, since of course it has to be John, comes at them with the Samurai sword. Hart attacks the children with an axe, and unfortunately, the movie cuts to the exterior of the barn. There is a lot of screaming and moaning inside that I know is not coming from John, so I guess it is a mixture of the children’s death throes and Hart mourning ahead of time that he will probably end up having to chop up John as well, who has indisputably become a monster if he wasn’t one before. Hart gets into his police car and gets on the radio, but no one responds, which makes him depressed until a child comes up from the back seat, missing a hand, and grabs him by the throat. The mustard gas rises one last time and Hart dies. John kills the child with the samurai sword. John kills the child with the samurai sword. I just wanted to write that twice. I know I’ll never get another chance. John sleeps with Hart’s head in his lap and wakes up when Kathy calls him from the house. He runs inside and finds Kathy in the bathroom going into labor. The camera pans around different locations as John helps Kathy give birth: a shot of Paul with burn marks on his chest and his severed hands in front of him, as if he was blasted out of his hands; the dead girl by the police car where her arms and legs that John cut off – he had no reason to cut off her legs; he just wanted to – lie all around her; and a shot of all the dead children in the barn. The final shot of The Children is John and Kathy’s newborn baby sucking on his mother’s breast with black fingernails. You are a bastard John. Goddamn you. |