Would you kill a child?
Has anyone had the pleasure of watching this gem of the 70's?
Who could kill a child? aka Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño?
It's a Spanish movie, after watching it you will see where Stephen King got his idea for his short story "Children of the Corn".
Taken from various websites -
Like so many other European films from the Seventies, Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? (released in 1975) has more titles than anyone can remember: so far I've come across 'Who Could Harm A Child?', 'Who Can Kill A Child?', 'Could You Kill A Child?', 'Trapped', 'Island of the Damned', 'Island of the Dead', 'Scream' (I kid you not), 'Todliche Befehle aus dem All', 'Les Revoltés de l'An 2000', 'Killer's Playground' and 'Death is Child's Play'.
The movie starts with several minutes of news footage, showing us how badly children have been treated, contrary to common belief that no one wants to harm children. There aren’t many films that’ll start with footage of WWII’s concentration camps, wounded children in Vietnam and African infants starving to death. The accompanying soundtrack of children chanting seems awkward, almost perverse.
After seven minutes of hard-hitting history lessons the movie starts with kids enjoying themselves at a beach. Up to the moment waves carry a woman’s corpse to the shore. Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? has started: enjoy yourselves.
Tom decides to visit a nearby island he remembers visiting when he was very young. This is the biggest mistake they could’ve made. They take the boat to a little village that seems to be deserted. The ice cream is runny and there’s noone in the pub. The couple can only spot a handful of kids. So what has happened? Where is everyone?
You don’t need too many clues to figure out that the children have started killing adults and there aren’t that many left. Some people are killed onscreen and this is quite upsetting: to the children, murdering someone almost seems like a game. And perhaps it is.
I can’t tell you more without revealing too much of the plot, but there are still a few things to be said. Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is a horror movie, but don’t expect it to be gory or you’ll be disappointed. I’d describe it as psychological horror, which is why the few gory bits are all the more unsettling. The movie has been compared with Children of the Corn, based on a Stephen King novel and many think King must have seen the Spanish movie before writing his book. This could have happened, but one shouldn’t forget there have been more movies and books where children end up taking over the world from adults (some of John Wyndham’s books spring to mind, especially The Midwich Cuckoos - made into two movies as Village of the Damned). Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is a far better film than Children of the Corn, so it’s a damn shame the movie is only released on DVD by a Spanish label who couldn’t see the use of adding subtitled to please the rest of the world. If you’re lucky, you might find a French dubbed version of Quien? under the title of Les Revoltés de l’An 2000, but you’ll probably hear of the movie while reading a specialized cult movie magazine. Maybe that’s part of the charm of the movie: that I myself own it twice, but only as a lame VHS copy of a copy dubbed in French and as a Spanish DVD without subtitles. I’ve seen the movie twice now and it isn’t always easy to understand what it’s about, but here we have a movie so clear in image language that it doesn’t really matter you won’t understand most of the dialogues (and to be honest, many scenes don’t have dialogues as the couple find the only inhabitants of the village, the children, are far from talkative).
Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? does not need dialogue to be good. The film succeeds in being both entertaining (in the way psychological horror movies entertain) and asking an interesting question: what would happen if children stopped being innocent victims? So obscure, relevant and good: movies don’t need much more to end up being cult.