Beware! Children at Play (1989).
The Stage.
A small backwoods town in rural New Jersey has a problem - children are going missing. The sheriff has no leads, and with the missing persons cases mounting up and the pressure being put on by the local yokels, he calls in the one guy he thinks can help - no, not more law enforcement, but a science fiction author and his bitchy, judgmental wife.
The Review.
We start with a really long set up to the story - a father and his young son are on a good old fashioned boys trip, doing things like fishing, roasting marshmallows over an open fire, and chasing each other through the woods acting like cannibals. During one of their hide and seek games, the father steps right into an armed bear trap. Whoops. Helpless and unable to open the trap, they wait for help, but a week into waiting and with rations running low, the father dies. His last words to his son are lines from Beowulf I guess, and upon taking his last gasp of air, the son plunges a knife into his chest and presumably eats his heart.
Into present day 1989, we catch up with the DeWolfe family. John, the patriarch, is an author who writes lurid tales of alien abductions and psychics that he swears are well researched and true. His wife Julia, an English professor, hates his profession because they have covers that feature women with cleavage…on both sides…yeah, wild. They’re headed out with their kid to see John’s military buddy, Ross. He’s the sheriff of this town and has a personal connection with the missing kids, as his daughter went missing a few years ago. Their only suspect is a religious zealot named farmer Braun and a pack of voices from the forest that other kids call “the woodies”. John and Ross try to find a culprit for the missing children but more people, including adults, are going missing or ending up dead.
This movie was a chore to get through - it’s mostly talking or dead ends for the majority of the run time, and aside from some sparse moments of extremely well done gore, like a guy getting cut in half or a skinned face with rats eating it, it’s…boring. I almost turned it off a few times. Then we get to the last five minutes.
I hadn’t heard of this movie before, but apparently there was a cloud of controversy when it was released, and now it’s easy to see why. Before I spoil why the controversy was afoot…and spoil the entire ending of the film, I will say that even as crazy as it gets in the last five minutes, it’s still a tough film to recommend because of how stale everything feels. If you’re still interested, skip ahead a few minutes. Anyway, that was your warning - spoilers incoming for this film starting now.
Turns out that the “woodies” are responsible for the missing kids and the killed adults. They’re led by our bear trap kid who we saw in the beginning of the film, but he’s grown now. He calls himself Grendel and has kidnapped and brainwashed these kids into becoming cannibalistic psychopaths. They kill almost all of the main characters in the film aside from John the author, who’s daughter has now been kidnapped by this pack of wild children. Great parenting move, by the way, bringing your kid to a town that has all of it’s kids being kidnapped. Anyway, John finds the kids and grabs his daughter, but an angry town mob led by farmer Braun encircles them all. John tries to talk them out of violence - “They’re just kids!” he yells, while calling them “Bible thumping morons!” to hold them at bay and to try to get them to change their minds. The mob, of whom many have children in this group who have been missing for a while, say “They’re not my kid anymore!” In any modern film, this is where the cavalry would come in to take care of the angry mob and to wrangle up the kids for rehabilitation. Not in this movie. NOT IN THIS FUCKING MOVIE.
In a shocking turn of events, Braun shoots John in the forehead, killing him instantly, and the angry mob starts violently murdering all of their kids. I’m talking shoving pitchforks through necks, sticking guns in kids mouths and blowing their brains out of the back of their heads, one particularly gruesome death sees two guys aim at one kid as his head literally explodes into pieces.
The End.
The whole thing is filled with a good dose of low budget charm, including some laughable special effects - when John gets shot in the head, you can literally see a string being pulled from his forehead to open the bullet hole wound and in another death, a reporter runs into a rack of spikes and impales herself, but when she lands, the spikes don’t even line up with the board they’re supposed to be on. But that being said, this film is hard to recommend and it feels like it just takes forever to get to the surprise at the end.
