Come Out and Play

We like to believe that small children are sweet and innocent, but the truth is between the ages of 8 and 15, children can be pretty cruel and heartless. 

The idea of psycho kids has a long history in film, with stuff like The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Omen, The Good Son, Children of the Corn, Joshua and others.  Come Out and Play is a fairly faithful remake of one of the better ones, a little-known Mexican film from 1976 by Narcisco Ibanez Serrador called Who Can Kill a Child?

The story is a simple one, a young couple (Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Vinessa Shaw) are taking one last vacation before she gives birth.  They go to a picturesque Mexican island town which they have heard is one of the most beautiful places in the world. 

Once they arrive, they are confused to find the town streets nearly completely deserted – other than a few surly looking kids and a dog, the village seems to be empty.  The hotel, the store, restaurants, all are open but no one is there.  However, they hear the sound of children playing and laughing somewhere in the town.  And who is the woman who is desperately radioing in a foreign language that the couple can't understand?

When they finally run across a few other adults, the others are quickly attacked and brutally beaten to death by a mob of laughing children.  One local dad tells them that something mysterious came over the children the night before, turning them brutal and leading to a complete slaughter of the village.  (There is no real explanation, or even hint of one, as to what turned the children violent.)  Yet the parents hadn't fought back, because who is going to fight their own child?

Therefore the frightened couple must try to make it back to their boat across town, but everywhere they go, there are dead-eyed groups of children lurking menacingly.

It's an intriguing, if not completely novel story idea.  Come Out and Play is sort of like a zombie movie, if the zombies were small, cute and prepubescent.

The remake is done with an interesting artistic look by eccentric Russian filmmaker Makinov (the name is an alias and he wears a mask whenever in public).  His movie moves at a slow, deliberate pace, building suspense luxuriously before eventually succumbing to violent panic.

Though Come Out and Play is not as good as (and is more gratuitously violent than) Who Can Kill a Child?, it is still a beautifully shot and smartly gauged filmed nightmare. 

Ken Sharp

Copyright ©2013 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: March 20, 2013.