Review: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

 Who Can Kill a Child? (¿Quién puede matar a un niño?) (1976)

Rated R

Score: 2 out of 5

Who Can Kill a Child? is a Spanish horror film with a daring premise that occasionally manages to live up to it, especially during its wild third act, but all too often finds itself mired in self-seriousness that felt like a poor man's George A. Romero, even though its best moments were the ones that ran headlong in the other direction from such. It's overly long, plodding, and beset by unlikable protagonists who constantly make stupid decisions, and while I got the social commentary it was going for, its attempts to convey such often dragged. This is a movie I'd love to see remade as a darkly satirical horror-comedy, as the basic conceit is one that still stings today, and the film's best moments were the ones that fully embraced the gonzo nature of that conceit and didn't pull their punches. As it stands, though, this doesn't really hold up beyond that.

The film gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately when it opens with a lengthy documentary montage of the history of how children have suffered in modern conflicts, from World War II to Korea to Biafra. I'll put aside the questions of whether or not this scene was in poor taste (it's pretty much of a kind with a lot of the "mondo" shockumentaries of the '60s and '70s) and instead focus on the fact that it came out of nowhere, contributed little, and was mostly rather boring. It was a ham-fisted way to convey this film's message, not through its actual story but by straight-up holding off on getting to the actual movie for several minutes so it can tell us. It felt like the filmmakers assumed that the audience was stupid and wouldn’t understand what was going on otherwise, especially since there were multiple moments when the film did and otherwise could’ve done this within the context of the story, from a scene where the characters are listening to a radio broadcast about violence in Southeast Asia to the climax where the kids explain exactly what they’re doing.

It doesn’t get much better in the rest of its first act. Our protagonists Tom and Evelyn, a young couple on vacation in Spain, are as dull as dishwater, with little characterization, fairly mediocre performances from the actors playing them, and lots of stupid decisions on their part once they get to the remote resort island where most of this film’s action takes place. They take far too long to realize that something is wrong once they get to the island and see no adults there, and even after they realize they’re not safe on the island, they don’t seem to act like it, whether it’s Tom failing to inform Evelyn (who doesn’t yet know what’s happening) what he saw the children doing to some poor schlub or a lone adult survivor they encountered abandoning all of his well-earned wariness around the island’s children when he runs into his own kid. I was able to buy the fact that the protagonists have a very difficult time bringing themselves to actually fight back against their attackers, because, as the title and one character helpfully inform us, who can kill a child? It was in these scenes where the characters know they’re in danger, try to act accordingly, but are held back from doing what they have to by the obvious moral dilemma involved that felt the most intense, as you knew that, either way, you were about to see something horrifying. Unfortunately, the adults’ poor decision-making went far beyond that, often feeling like it had been contrived for the sole purpose of advancing the story along to where the writers wanted it to go.

It was when the focus was put on the children themselves that I was the most intrigued. The basic premise is that somehow, the children on this island have come to develop both a psychic link and a virulent, murderous hatred of adults, seeking revenge for how they have no say in adults’ wars and conflicts and yet are usually the ones who suffer the most in such, a premise that, for my money, is evergreen and no less relevant today than it was in 1976. And when this movie is putting its focus on the children, it kicks ass. The thing that grabbed me is that these kids aren’t portrayed as the usual “creepy kids” you normally see in horror movies, acting in troubling, distinctly unchildlike ways to make them seem more off-putting immediately. No, these kids, as murderous as they are, still fundamentally act like kids and treat what they’re doing as a kind of play session, most notably when they string up a guy’s corpse and use him as a piñata (and a scythe as the stick to beat him with) while acting like they’re at a birthday party. It’s sick, it’s mean-spirited, it’s darkly hilarious, and it's a tone that I felt the whole movie should’ve leaned into. Instead of trying to take itself so seriously, it should’ve taken the South Park approach and leaned into satire and black comedy, depicting the idea of children suddenly turning against the adults around them and playing it for a ridiculousness that makes it that much wilder and more shocking. There were already elements of this in the final product, from the piñata scene to the ending where the police finally show up from the mainland and react to everything that has happened (and the children react to them in turn). More importantly, depicting the film’s setting as a sick, sad world that’s slowly going mad would’ve done a lot to alleviate the problem I had with the dumb adult characters. A little black comedy, I’ve noticed, can turn that into an asset, especially if the film is mocking its protagonists for their stupidity and presenting them as avatars of everything else it's mocking about the world as a whole.

The Bottom Line

Who Can Kill a Child? had an interesting premise but only really came together in its third act, and before then was a fairly boring film that thought itself more profound than it actually was to the point of insulting viewers' intelligence. It's only worth a watch for diehard aficionados of retro European horror.