Other
than the shocker of an ending, 'Beware! Children at Play' is a
somewhat banal horror that has serious acting and pacing issues.
It's
another Troma Team movie (these guys have a special place in my
heart) and like many others, it's terrible. After a fairly
interesting opening sequence (a guy and his kid are camping out in
New Jersey, the man dies, and the kid eats him) the film slows down
and quickly becomes boring. The kid is now a young man, and is
completely feral and obsessed with stories of Grendel from Beowulf.
He gathers a kids, which fall under his spell ridiculously easily,
and goes around killing and eating adults. There are a few cool deaths, but too
much boring exposition, until we reach the insane climax.
All
the kids get brutally massacred by the townspeople. Yep. Stabbed,
shot, axed, pitch forked, macheted - one even gets shot in the mouth,
and his brains splatter onto a wooden wall with a big smiley face on
it. I loved it, and to be honest I was laughing and clapping for most
of this scene. The gore isn't very well done, and the acting is
terrible, but that makes for some fun moments.
The
surprise ending doesn't quite push this film into the “so bad it's
good” category though, as the rest of the film drags so much and I
never really liked, let alone connected, with any of the main
characters. The script is lazy and boring, the footage quality and lighting is just generally bad, and the audio is impressively terrible (on the version I watched anyway).
Beware! Children at Play: 24.7