Hey, look! It’s a good old-fashioned horror movie!
If this had come out in the 70s, it’d be a minor classic. It even has the old-school analog synth soundtrack. Vacationing couple gets stuck in an island in Mexico where it turns out, the night just before they arrived, all the kids suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and killed all the adults.
It’s kind of the opposite of “Mom & Dad”, or “The Birds” but with children instead of birds. In fact, I’d be surprised if “The Birds” wasn’t a conscious influence. But the nice thing is, that’s as close as it gets to cliches, excepting the title. Very far from a Hollywood horror movie, that’s for sure.
Light on gore in terms of screentime devoted to it, but extremely gory in the few brief moments it’s shown. Not great by a long stretch, but good, in a way that they don’t really make horror movies anymore… definitely only for horror fans, though. Gets pretty brutal by the end, seriously doesn’t pull its punches, which, when you consider the bad guys are a bunch of children, is even more brutal. Probably deserves to be on my “honorable mention” list, although of my “honorable mention” films, I could see this being one of the least popular ones.
Looks like the kids probably had a mess of fun making it, too.
Amusingly, Wikipedia says this film made a total of about $2500 in theaters. Also, turns out, it’s an almost shot-for-shot remake of a 1976 Spanish horror film called “Who Can Kill a Child?” which, really, would be a much better title for what it is. It’s funny, because something about it reminded me of Long Weekend, another unjustly underappreciated ’70s also-ran horror film which I got turned on to by strongly liking a remake that nobody else cared for.