ShangLuda Admirable film.

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

dhainline1 This movie "The Children" is a very good, scary early 1980s movie about innocent kids who get exposed to yellowish smoke from a nuclear power plant and they end up as black finger-nailed zombies who burn people to death when they hug them. It really isn't the fault of the kids what happened! Two nuclear power workers who make Homer Simpson look like a Mensa member release the fumes into the air and it changes these kids into bloodless monsters. The parents seem strangely indifferent about the disappearance of the children. The worst offender is 9-year-old Janet Shore's mother, Dee-Dee who is smoking pot, topless by her swimming pool. Her muscle-bound boyfriend seems as indifferent as Dee-Dee is. Dee-Dee seems excited by her daughter's apparent abduction and never acts like a frantic mother. The young officer who is searching for the children is no better. He wants to make out with young, missing Paul's sister, Susie rather than looking for Paul! Jenny's parents were more sympathetic, though. The stress of having a killer, zombie preteen daughter is getting to them and Cathy, the mother who is very pregnant smokes a cigarette when her nerves are on edge. She is reluctant to kill her daughter and the other children even though she knows her husband and the other, older police officer know they have to do that to defend themselves! This movie has very little blood, but the microwaving of human flesh and screams from the parents are quite jarring!

Carlos Idelone Lame rip-off of "Village of the Damned". Acting was lame, special effects were lame, and the obvious "twist" ending was lame. " I can't believe, I watched the whole thing!" A bit of 70's silliness and nudity livened it up a little, for your inner adolescent. I would regard a repeat viewing, as cruel and unnatural punishment. I guess it could be alright to watch with a rowdy group, if you were all hammered. The soundtrack is quite comical. The manner in which they "dispatch" of the children is extremely lame. "The Village of the Damned" is a masterpiece compared to this pathetic drivel. I highly recommend it, as well as, the book on which it was based, "The Midwich Cuckoos", by John Wyndam.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki Let me see if I have this correct: there is a group of kids, and the bus they are riding in drives though a cloud caused by a radioactive leak in a chemical plant in a small town, which causes them to incinerate people ... by hugging them? Are you serious? Film never explains why they feel this uncontrollable desire to hug/ burn people, nor how they are able to burn people alive by hugging them. They should have hugged (and incinerated) the makers of this film. Slow pacing, disgusting effects, and a mean streak are all on tap in this low budget time waster. It repeatedly puts little kids in harm's way with its ridiculous setpieces, as we see the kids getting shot and having their hands hacked off with a swords. And, in the end, we realise that all they have to do to kill these small kids is to chop off their hands with an ax. Ugh. The musical cues are so derivative of Friday the 13th, that composer Harry Manfredini should sue himself for that. The movie comes complete with the required shock twist ending, which is 100% predictable.

Milo-Jeeder Silly movies like this always cheer me up for some reason. I've read some of the other reviews and I can't believe some people would actually take a movie like this so seriously. The premise is laughable to begin with and Troma is well known for producing these kinds of delirious flicks. 'The Children' is neither scary nor atmospheric, but there's something about it that makes it worthy somehow. I don't know about the others, but I refuse to dislike a cheap horror movie from the early 80s about a group of zombie children with black fingernails who kill their victims by giving them a deadly hug. The "special effects" are just as laughable as the plot and this film is one of those cases in which I actually feel a strange admiration towards the director for making an effort with insufficient resources. A different director would have probably desisted or maybe even step out of the project, but Mr. Max Kalmanowicz took the risk and in the end, the results were good enough to release a future 'guilty pleasure'. Whatever the case may be, guilty pleasure or not, the director deserves credit for creating this stupidly fun little flick.There's something oddly compelling about evil children in horror films, isn't there? I've seen my decent share of this kind and I realized that even if sometimes the film itself is not very good, there's still something morbidly fascinating about a child murdering a grown up. In this case, however, I think we could say that 'The Children' is more of a zombie flick instead. I know the killers are a group of five children who wander around a small town killing grown-ups, but they never actually act like human beings to begin with. We never see them talking to each other, planning their atrocities or expressing any emotions at all. They're just empty creatures with no personality or feelings whatsoever and the only reason why they kill, it's because at the very beginning of the film, they are all zombified by some kind of toxic cloud (?) These children are not exactly evil and they have no personalities because they're not human. So anyone who is in the mood to see a movie about mischievous children instead of zombies... skip this one because this is not what you're looking for.What actually struck me about this film however, is that it seems to have a morally upright message. 'The Children' is mostly an unpretentious horror film, but there's still something strange about the grown characters if you analyze them. Most of the children's parents are portrayed as liberal people who don't play by the rules and guess what happens to all of them... exactly what you're thinking, yes! All right, first we have a lesbian couple (one of them is also very much into taking sedative pills), then we have an uncaring mother who smokes weed and shows her boobs and then we have a seemingly homosexual man who goes to town for no reason whatsoever. I wonder if these characters were unusual just to add a little 'something' or if there was some kind of hidden conservative propaganda behind the story.Either way, this movie is fine and if you're in the mood for some modest entertainment, give 'The Children' a chance... but don't let them hug you, for crying out loud!