Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This is one of the most interesting, challenging straight-up horror movies that I've ever seen. Truly ambitious both aesthetically and thematically, it transcends what we usually ask from the genre.The most truly horrifying scenes are the opening ones of the film which are composed of news footage of many of the twentieth century's horrors: global and civil conflicts marked by mass civilian casualties which, the narrator opines, always hit children the hardest. The many images of dead kids are the hardest to take in this generally mean and nasty little picture.The acting is in general far above what we would expect from a Euro-shock film but the most memorable and unique performances are those of the island children who have (inexplicably?) become bloodthirsty killers of adults. Many of them beautiful, the children seem authentically... childish. Their smiles and laughter seem innocent and sincere and this makes what they are laughing about, sadistic murders, seem all the more disturbing.Some will accuse me of overthinking the matter, but I came away with a distinctly political interpretation of the movie, which seems all the more convincing to me given that the film was made in the mid 1970s when many ideological clashes were taking a very violent form in many parts of the world. This is a terrifyingly even handed portrait of cultural revolution. We, as western film consumers, are allowed to identify with the victim-adults: representatives of the old order. But, the film's opening images of real life hellscapes begs us to ask, are we to blame the victims of the old order for wanting to destroy it and start over?

This movie really shocked me and haunted me long after I'd seen it at its original release. Even when I reviewed it many years later, it still creeped me out. The most frightening thing about it was the atmosphere, the loneliness of the deserted island and the eeriness of the silent, sullen staring children. It took a normal situation on a beautiful sun-drenched Spanish island and turned it into something very alien, very uncanny and very dangerous. The main characters, along with myself, became confused, disoriented and disbelieving of their situation. Here, the children's laughter signified something totally different, to that to which we are used to. I think, that the scariest movies are those, which take ordinary circumstances where we all feel at ease, and then flip them into something unrecognizable, that leaves us without our footing, our confidence and vulnerable to the "unknown".

A couple of British holidaymakers arrive in a small island off the Spanish coast, only to find the place totally empty of adults and the children acting in a sinister way. We soon find out that the children blew a fuse all of a sudden, and murdered all the grown-ups. Obviously, the little bastards are not going to let the visitors get away and spill the beans. Armed with clubs, knives, scythes and guns, they chase the hysterical pair all over the island, and the conclusion is quite predictable. This little film possesses a beautiful photography and an effective score to deliver the chills, but then there are a number of flaws in the script that weight against the story's credibility: who would want to live on an island too far away from the mainland when there is not a miserable telephone line or a radio to keep the islanders in touch with the rest of the world in the case of an emergency? What kind of a man would drag his heavily pregnant wife on a four-hour trip by boat in the blazing sun to stay for days in a place where there are not any medical facilities? And finally, dozens of bodies are lying all over the village in that sweltering heat, but still they don't decompose and stink but remain fresh and in pristine condition!!Nevertheless, it is a reasonably good horror film with an interesting story about kids from hell, and the children look quite sinister and evil. Nowadays we have seen so many movies about child psychopaths that this film may seem a bit lame to us, but we must think that when it first came out in 1976 it must have been quite shocking to audiences. I have recently seen the Mexican remake made two years ago, and it is virtually a carbon copy of this original almost shot by shot. If you want to remake something, at least try to make it better, use your imagination to improve the camera-work, take some time to revise the script so there will be not plot-holes the size of a bulldozer in it, and definitely get a bunch of kids who really look and act creepy and not like a kindergarten class!

This movie succeeds at what so many other genre movies attempted but failed at. The movie by all means is just like any other genre entry from the '70's but yet it manages to excel and rise above the normal level of standard that is customary within the genre.It's because the movie gets basically everything right. Or at least its most important genre aspects. What makes the movie foremost work out as an effective one are its children. Over the years lots of horror movies featured children in it, that were supposed to be the movie its most scary and threatening aspects. This however only successfully worked out in just a handful of movies, which is mainly due to the children not always being the greatest actors or just not looking very threatening at all. But the children in this movie are surely threatening ones! You can basically see this movie like a typical '70's zombie flick, with as a difference that the zombies are being replaced by normal looking children this time around.They are really like animals, hunting down and tricking their preys. It's not a very gory movie, like basically none of the Spanish genre movies from around that time really were, especially when compared to the Italian ones but it's being effective in more other horror ways. It often uses a great build up and sets some of the sequences up nicely, in which the children all really come across as dangerous, even though they are all little, cute looking ones.It must had made the movie really controversial at its time, especially since it shows the children doing things you have probably never seen before in any other sort of movie. It can be a quite brutal movie, especially with its opening and ending.The movie opens with real news footage of children who were killed during wars, such as in WW II concentration camps by the Nazi's. Seriously, this is stuff we didn't even get to see in "Nuit et brouillard" and its being quite graphic to look at because you know that what you are watching is all real. I don't think this opening was really necessary to be put in the movie and it seems mainly put in for its shock value. It sorts of set up for the motivation for the children to become cold blood killers in the movie but it's not really something that gets build on or explored further. The movie just doesn't do too much with its story and it actually is all pretty standard stuff when it comes down to its writing.It's also a movie with plenty of slow moments in it. It actually isn't until half way through the movie that things really start to take off, when they finally get to the island and have their fist unusual and dangerous encounter. It's still a movie that does a lot wrong and also had a low budget working against it but in the end none of this really matters, since "¿Quién puede matar a un niño?" is a movie that works out surprisingly well within its genre.By all means, this shouldn't had been a movie that worked out but yet it all did. I think that is the biggest compliment you can give this movie.8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/