I know that Sickle and I were not personally in Hell for child violence, but Come Out and Play definitely made us question our stance on how they are treated here. The movie takes place in your generic tropical Mexican shady vacation area and follows a couple who decided it is a good idea to go to a remote island…on a rented boat… without telling anyone. So now that we have established they are mentally impaired, we can understand why many of the pitfalls of this movie happen.
Typically when talking about children and horror we think we will be seeing a lot of taboo and “depraved” scenes. This movie fails to deliver on this front. The worst seen we see is a few kids standing over a body what has been gutted. Not the most horrific thing, I mean, my nephews do that all the time so color me unimpressed. The lackluster creativity was a symptom of a greater failure of the movie.
[I found there to be a rather morbid creativity in the film’s elaborate pro-life scheme that plays out near its climax, but I digress from Efrit’s point, which is valid in the context of the rest of the film. – Sickle]
When we watch things like Dawn of the Dead (2004), 28 Days Later or even Mad Max we get a look into what I like to call, “How to Handle a Horde.” These films let us see the creative and interesting ways to deal with large groups of “entities” you want to survive against. In Dawn of the Dead (2004) they use a propane tank in a very interesting way to clear out a horde in front of their super-awesome battle wagon! In 28 Days Later we see a home defense tactic with shopping carts that is very effective. Lastly in Mad Max we get to see how even when driving cars you can take out entire groups of other using your superior car driving ability.
The main failure of this movie lies in a combination of these two ideas: How do you deal with hordes of things and how do you deal with hyper violent children. Come Out and Play fails to use any interesting device to handle a horde of children other than hiding in a barred room…multiple times. And this is all due to the fact that no one wants to hurt children.
This is incredibly frustrating. I would like to poll the grater Hell population (child murderers excluded) and see who would allow themselves to get killed in order to uphold some moral foundation about children. If something is trying to kill you and you like living you deal with it. To our delight this does happen in the last 3 min of the movie. The problem is finally dealt with. And it is slightly cathartic and validating. That finally what I had been advocating to Sickle the entire film had finally transpired.
In the end it is nothing to write home about. If you wanna watch children doing horrible stuff just watch the classics, Children of the Corn, Let the Right One In and Village of the Damned. There is no need for this movie, period.