The
Children (1980) - 25th Anniversary Edition
Picture: C Sound: C- Extras:
B- Film: C-
I remember seeing the poster in the theater lobby and the
trailer for The Children in August of 1980 before a showing of Smokey
and the Bandit Part II. The poster intrigued me and the trailer really
scared me. I was, however, 9 years old at the time, and most of the
audience watching Smokey and the Bandit II that day was around my age or
just a little older. That was back in the days when you could show R-rated
trailers before PG-rated movies, and the theater obviously knew what they were
doing. The Children would be opening there in a couple weeks, and
despite the R rating, pre-teens were the perfect audience for it.
I finally caught up to The Children after all these years
recently thanks to Troma's all-region 25th Anniversary Edition DVD. After
watching it, I find it hard to believe that I once stared at the ads in the
newspaper thinking it was something scary. Truly, it's a film only a 9 year
old could find even remotely frightening.
Filmed on a shoestring in the summer of 1979 in Massachusetts, The
Children plays like a cross between Village of the Damned and Night
of the Living Dead. It's about what happens in the small town of
Ravensback after a nuclear leak at a local power plant causes a yellow
radioactive cloud to float through town. After a school bus
transporting about half a dozen kids is forced to drive through the radioactive
cloud, the children aboard the bus become zombies with black fingernails and
the ability to fry people to a crisp upon touch. After several unsuspecting local residents get fried, the town
sheriff (Gil Rogers) and a parent of one of the affected children (Martin
Shakar, who played John Travolta's priest brother in Saturday Night Fever)
try to find a way to stop them.
The back of the DVD case claims that The Children was
"a box-office smash and one of the top grossing films of that
year." While I wouldn't doubt that The Children was a very
profitable film because it cost so little, why did such a "smash hit"
play in my medium-size American city at one indoor theater and several
drive-ins for just a single week in late August/early September of 1980?
I can assure you, The Children wasn't one of the biggest hits of that
year. Profitable? Probably.
A smash? No way. This is a tendency of those who made indie
Horror releases that build note after a certain period of time to make such
claims to ensure their legacy, but that does not make such information truer or
more accurate.
Troma says their DVD of The Children is taken from one of
the only surviving prints, which obviously wasn't in great shape. The
claim that it's been "remastered" is also questionable since lines,
marks and blotches are visible on-screen throughout. The DVD is presented
in a (1.33:1) full-screen frame, and while the color is sharp, they could
have at least made an effort to erase those scratches. The sound, though,
is even worse with static audible in the background throughout.
Disappointingly, the extras don't include that theatrical trailer that scared
me all those years ago, but there is an audio commentary by writer/producer
Carlton Albright, interviews with Albright, his wife, Gil Rogers and production
manager David Platt, and clips from a silly-looking musical version stage
version of The Children performed during the late 1990s.
There's also a pointless introduction by Troma President Lloyd Kaufman.
One of the most interesting tidbits learned about the
film from this DVD is that much of the crew went from working on The
Children directly to working on the original Friday the 13th
feature film. The musical score for The Children was done by Harry
Manfredini, who also did a very similar-sounding score for Friday the
13th, which was made just after but released just before The Children.
If you removed that recurrent "chi chi chi ahhh ahhh ahhh" out
of the Friday the 13th score, you'd pretty much have the music for The
Children.
- Chuck O'Leary
