philandsarah-68619 This could have been a good film but I couldn't get past the first 30 minutes. The sound effects team have clearly just stuck a tape recorder in a Jungle Jim soft play park & recorded screaming kids for 2 hours. Awful, awful noise pollutes the film.

wildblueyonder Like so many bad movies, it starts off OK.. visually at times its interesting, but it just does not come together.There could, IMO, be a lot to say in this plot, but the movie just does not deliver. Still, kept me waiting.. there was some suspense.

Sandcooler I wasn't expecting that much from this movie, because it all just seemed very familiar. Evil children turning on their parents who are too dumb to notice anything's wrong until it's too late, there are at least a dozen movies like that. Combine that with an incredibly uninspired title and you get a movie that just sits on my shelf for years.Unjustly, because as unoriginal and predictable this movie is...it's also really freightening! The scary atmosphere is done really well, and it helps that you don't actually see the children kill for the first two acts. It's all in the power of suggestion, and in the feeling of dread you get from every scene. The child actors are also great, their blank, unemotional stares send shivers down my spine. The plot follows the creepy kid formula beat by beat, but it's not a problem. Just take the obligatory first kill, the one that always looks like it's an accident. That scene is executed perfectly, really unnerving. The movie never really drops the ball from then on.There's nothing ground-breaking about "The Children", there's not even anything interesting to the plot. It's very much style over substance, but the style is great and that's enough for me to recommend it.

GL84 When a family gathers together at a large mountainside cottage for a reunion, the children come into contact with a strange virus that makes them homicidal maniacs who begin to kill off the others one-by-one, forcing them into a fight for survival to get away. This one was a pretty problematic yet still enjoyable effort. When this one works, there's several things here that make this wholly enjoyable. There's some nice atmospheric scenes here with the snowbound setting provided a great place here which is incredibly important at deriving the perfect sense of isolation required here, as the coldness and wintry feeling is quite appropriate for the type of story here. There's also the fact that there's a rather nice series of encounters and attacks here that move this along very well, as the initial encounters out amongst the very edges of the house playing demented versions of children's games that constitute deadly forms of chasing around as scenes in the playground or out in the frosty woods surrounding the house so there's a lot of enjoyable times with that. As well, there's other rather fun encounters inside the house as the kids get more aggressive and daring in their homicidal instincts which brings about some really thrilling chases around the house as the scenes in the kitchen and bedroom are all featured here which makes for a rather fun time, and feature enough gore to get this one some extra fun along the way. These have enough to make this enjoyable enough, even if there's quite a few storyline problems. That is a major stumbling block with the film, as the majority of the time with this one is spent in situations that not everyone can relate to. Far too much of this is based around the situation of how parents would react in those situations, but that leaves way too many scenes where the parental instincts are pushed to the forefront and common sense and logic fall by the wayside. This one constantly keeps them in danger after failing to realize the obvious and trust in their parental instincts, and it gets old after the twentieth time spent utilizing the same set-up over and over again due to the stupidity exhibited. The other flaw to this one is the true lack of explanation for the virus, as there's little given here about its properties and origins for infecting the kids since all we get is the specific age range and how to get infected, but after that there's nothing here to give this away or what it does. That can be somewhat infuriating, but otherwise there's not all that much wrong here.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, violence-against-children and children-in-jeopardy.