Suffer (from) the Children

(This is my day-late entry for Final Girl's Hey, Internet, Stop Being Such Cynical Effing Douchebags Blog-a-Thon! (which I didn't hear about until today), in which she's encouraged online critics to "wear your heart on your sleeve and tell us all why you love something." In honor of our host's dedication to horror films, I decided to praise a criminally underseen and misunderstood entry in the "scary little kid" subgenre.)

One can only imagine what awful child-related experience prompted Carlton Albright and Edward Terry to write a screenplay as horrific as The Children; perhaps they suspect their kids of being the mailman's progeny. The "scary little kid" subgenre has never been scarier or more nihilistic than this incredibly effective and incredibly nasty bargain-basement shockfest. Its premise is simple: a busload of kids drives through a toxic fog and turns into... into what? They still look like apple-cheeked, sweet-faced munchkins, except their fingernails are black, and if they touch you, they melt the flesh from your bones. To paraphrase the song, I believe the children are our future, and there ain't no future here.

After a prologue that establishes the source of the toxic fog, we follow the sheriff (Gil Rogers) as he tries to figure out why the school bus would be sitting empty on the side of the road. After he finds the first victim (the bus driver), his immediate concern is again with the children: who will protect them from whatever did this to the driver? It takes everyone concerned an inordinately long time to decide, finally, that the kids are the reason behind the rapidly accumulating bodies. But that's natural: we in the audience know we're watching a horror film called The Children, but it's almost against our instincts to suspect children of being capable of killing.

The acting and dialogue are standard for the horror genre, meaning that they're basically sub-par, but that fact doesn't detract from the movie's effectiveness a whit. Director Max Kalmanowicz's staging of scenes is nothing special during the first two acts, when it's still daylight and the adults are still trying to figure out what's going on. But once night falls, his true gifts come into play. Under cover of near-darkness, he exhibits an almost supernatural mastery of simple, evocative, and scary-as-hell shot framing, shock reveals, and pacing. He doesn't make the mistake, common in the slasher genre, of overlighting his shots: the lighting here is the familiar blindness-inducing pitch black of a moonless night, in which headlights, flashlights, and candles illuminate just enough to remind you of how cavern-dark everything else is. It's here, in the dark, where he uses his scary kids brilliantly. Smiling, arms outstretched, calling "mommy, mommy" in their piping voices, they loom out of the blackness like pretty little angels of death: this is the single scariest image I can remember from any horror film.

And if the soul-destroying horror of children turned into monsters weren't enough, the film bravely (if that's the right word; "sadistically" would fit too) follows through on its premise by making the destruction of the children necessary (i.e., there's no cure) and even more awful than the children themselves: only chopping off their hands will stop them. Both hands. That the camera pulls away from the scene of greatest carnage is no salve: the camera tracks slowly, sinuously out of a barn, into the yard, through a house, through the woods, as unearthly screams prompt our imaginations to supply pictures more nauseating than any makeup artist could create. And that's not even the most disturbing, or nihilistic, of the film's little horrors—it saves its biggest kick for last.

The unfair 5.1 rating on IMDB could reflect any number of things: disgust with The Children's awful nihilism, or failure to look past the low-budget aesthetics to the impressive way Kalmanowicz and company embrace and twist the genre's conventions and limitations. It's certainly not for everybody. It's probably not for most people. You know who you are.

Top Ten Films of 2007, or, Time to Move On

Yes, I realize that it's more than one-sixth of the way through 2008: it's still not too late to finally list my top ten films of last year. Especially because, if I don't do it now, I might never do it (see, for example, my incomplete 2006 list). I've recycled some of the descriptions from my unfinished Goaties because otherwise I might have never finished these.

So here goes: the best films I saw last year.

10. Honeydripper, John Sayles's latest, was dumped unceremoniously into the post-Christmas netherworld, and it's a damned shame, because it's among his best in years. Sayles presents an imaginative parable of the birth of rock 'n' roll, lets some of the best African American actors around chew on his meaty dialogue, and doesn't overreach by trying to cram in too many storylines.

9. No Country for Old Men. The Coens won their first Director and Picture Oscars for this modern western that springs from a slick tale of the aftermath of a botched drug deal into convention-busting shifts in tone and ballsy narrative surprises. It helped turn Josh Brolin into Hollywood's new post-ironic man's man, gave Tommy Lee Jones one of (apparently—I still haven't seen In the Valley of Elah) two memorable roles last year, and introduced one of the cinema's most memorable bad guys in Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh.

8. Red Road is a surprising, sometimes opaque non-thriller thriller about revenge and guilt. It's quarterbacked by Kate Dickie, in one of the year's best performances, as one of the people who monitor the countless privacy-sucking cameras that blanket Glasgow; one day, she sees someone who shouldn't be there. And that's all I can say: Andrea Arnold's film is so secretive and enigmatic for most of its running time that I wouldn't dream of revealing more than that.

7. In A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie gave the best female performance of the year, and part of what made it so great was her generosity: she and Michael Winterbottom, always an interesting director (except when he's wanking), position Marianne Pearl in the middle of an impressive array of supporting roles, and the film is more interested in how Jolie shares the scenes with her fellow actors than in being The Angie Show. All of this exists in a tense, expertly directed suspense film that was inexplicably dismissed by many critics and ignored by most awards.

6. No End in Sight explains, in agonizing detail (agonizing because it's so completely horrendous), why the situation in Iraq is as screwed up as it is; interviews with such surprisingly high-profile players as George Packer and General Jay Garner, whose short-lived tenure as top American in Baghdad showed the promise of success and whose quick removal illustrated the Bush administration's almost willful destruction of any chance of cleaning up the mess they started with the 2003 invasion. The documentary is insightful, informative, and the most depressing film in a year of notable depressing films.

5. Black Book is a sexy, old-fashioned spy thriller about a not-too-good spy (Carice Van Houlton) who falls in love with the not-too-bad Nazi she's been instructed to seduce. What's great about the film's depiction of this amateur Mata Hari is that Houlton sucks as a spy: she's obvious, nervous, and twitchy, and she doesn't fool anyone; what's great and surprising about Paul Verhoven's script and direction is that it shows the surrounding situation (Nazi occupation of the Netherlands) as oblivious to her merits or demerits as a snoop.

4. There Will Be Blood is an overambitious but fascinating achievement that's dragged through its rough spots by Paul Thomas Anderson's staggeringly assured directorial vision and Daniel Day-Lewis's earth-shaking performance. Its quirky take on American history leaves a lot out, but it succeeds as a parable of the role of greed and religion in American society. It's also frequently, and self-consciously, dazzling.

3. Zoo addresses its topic—men who have sex with horses—elliptically, by refusing to explain it, by almost refusing the very idea that it can be explained to someone who doesn't share that particular desire. There's an enigmatic scene in which one of the actors in the reenactments explains how he connected to his role by thinking of a particularly bad accident he witnessed; I was struck by what a tenuous and false connection he was creating, and I realized that the film was telling us the same thing: you think you can get your head around this, but you're wrong.

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a nightmarish odyssey into totalitarianism. Anamaria Marinca gives one of the best performances of the year as a young woman who attempts to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate; guided by Oleg Mutu's unforgiving and unsteady handheld camera, we follow her into a hell that tests the limits of her friendship and our ability to keep from screaming. (I staggered out of this screening, shaken to the core, and then dashed off to see Wes Anderson's candy-coated triviality The Darjeeling Limited, a transition I do not recommend.)

1. Once is the kind of film that the do-it-yourself digital revolution was supposed to provide but so often doesn't: a small, personal, heartbreaking film that emphasizes the interactions between characters in a compelling way. Its music is heavenly, and the characters (played by musicians) who create it on- and offscreen are convincing and lived-in.