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Ok all you pretty ghouls I am back with another review and a new title, Evil Ally Cat reviews and today’s movie is a the 1980 cult horror film The Children or The Children of Ravensback, directed by Max Kalmanowicz and stars mostly TV acting veterans, such as Martin Shaker, Gale Garnett and Gil Rogers as the sheriff. The one noteworthy crew member would be composer Harry Mafredini who created the Jason theme for the Friday the 13th films and I will give credit to the makeup artist Craig Lyman who went to on to do some impressive feature films, who’s most recent credits include Spiderman 3 and Men in Black 3. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much on this movie, other than that the film company Troma Entertainment released on dvd with a backing from fans.
The Children is a film about children who go through a mysterious fog that was caused by a nuclear power plant and come back to terrorize the adults of Ravensback, a small New England town filled with a bunch of self centered adults who don’t seem to realize that their children are missing until the sheriff points it out. The movie starts out simply enough with two unnamed men at a power plant, who rather than fix a leak in a pipe that could possibly be life threatening, go have a beer instead. This leak creates a mysterious fog where the most well behaved kids in the universe ride a bus that drives right through it. The town is your typical small town that has only two cops and apparently only has a population of about twenty. After the sheriff(played by Gil Rogers) discovers the empty bus we start to get a sense of something wrong and after he discovers this we start to discover that children have started killing people starting with the bus driver. After the empty bus discovered the sheriff starts investigating the disappearance all hell breaks loose. The kids kill people by hugging them and that causes them to be burned alive, in an actually not bad effect and wastes no time getting into the action of children killing their parents. We don’t see a lot of onscreen kills, which I didn’t really have a gripe against because the director wanted to create tension and suspense, which works well in some scenes, but tried way to hard in others. There were some genuinely creepy shots in the movie and the quiet atmosphere worked in its favor, however the way the children lured in their victims is unintentionally hilarious and I couldn’t help but yell out free hugs every time they showed that, I know it drove Pandora crazy. Through out the movie they tried to find a way to stop the children and they eventually found out by cutting their hands off it worked and at the movies climax includes the sheriff hacking up a bunch of children in a barn, which is actually a pretty dramatic scene done pretty well. The one big let down of this movie is that you can see the twist coming from a mile away and it took to long to get there.
Conclusion, this movie on the whole wasn’t bad and if you’re a fan of 70’s and early 80’s horror films you probably won’t be disappointed by it. The acting is pretty good here, with a great performance by Gil Rogers and a standout performance by Martin Shaker who plays one of the parents makes this movie a surprisingly good watch, as does the score by Manfredini. The makeup effects aren’t bad for what they are, the burn effect is actually pretty good for a low budget. The directing Kalmanowicz is pretty solid, sadly its the last feature film he ever did as a director he went on to work in sound editing working mostly on short films, documentaries and TV series, most notably on the Sopranos. On the whole I give this movie a 6/10 not great, but its really hard not like this movie, despite some of the unintentional laughs I got out of this movie. It deserves it’s cult status and I hope one day it gets a broader audience. Stay tuned for my next review, which will be my favorite bad horror film of last year, the Poltergiest of Borley Forrest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px4w9Vc2S9E
2016_all the arts music movies tv and more: Alyce Victoria original post:
Ok all you pretty ghouls I am back with another review and a new title, Evil Ally Cat reviews and today’s movie is a the 1980 cult horror film The Children or The Children of Ravensback, directed by Max Kalmanowicz and stars mostly TV acting veterans, such as Martin Shaker, Gale Garnett and Gil Rogers as the sheriff. The one noteworthy crew member would be composer Harry Mafredini who created the Jason theme for the Friday the 13th films and I will give credit to the makeup artist Craig Lyman who went to on to do some impressive feature films, who’s most recent credits include Spiderman 3 and Men in Black 3. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much on this movie, other than that the film company Troma Entertainment released on dvd with a backing from fans.
The Children is a film about children who go through a mysterious fog that was caused by a nuclear power plant and come back to terrorize the adults of Ravensback, a small New England town filled with a bunch of self centered adults who don’t seem to realize that their children are missing until the sheriff points it out. The movie starts out simply enough with two unnamed men at a power plant, who rather than fix a leak in a pipe that could possibly be life threatening, go have a beer instead. This leak creates a mysterious fog where the most well behaved kids in the universe ride a bus that drives right through it. The town is your typical small town that has only two cops and apparently only has a population of about twenty. After the sheriff(played by Gil Rogers) discovers the empty bus we start to get a sense of something wrong and after he discovers this we start to discover that children have started killing people starting with the bus driver. After the empty bus discovered the sheriff starts investigating the disappearance all hell breaks loose. The kids kill people by hugging them and that causes them to be burned alive, in an actually not bad effect and wastes no time getting into the action of children killing their parents. We don’t see a lot of onscreen kills, which I didn’t really have a gripe against because the director wanted to create tension and suspense, which works well in some scenes, but tried way to hard in others. There were some genuinely creepy shots in the movie and the quiet atmosphere worked in its favor, however the way the children lured in their victims is unintentionally hilarious and I couldn’t help but yell out free hugs every time they showed that, I know it drove Pandora crazy. Through out the movie they tried to find a way to stop the children and they eventually found out by cutting their hands off it worked and at the movies climax includes the sheriff hacking up a bunch of children in a barn, which is actually a pretty dramatic scene done pretty well. The one big let down of this movie is that you can see the twist coming from a mile away and it took to long to get there.
Conclusion, this movie on the whole wasn’t bad and if you’re a fan of 70’s and early 80’s horror films you probably won’t be disappointed by it. The acting is pretty good here, with a great performance by Gil Rogers and a standout performance by Martin Shaker who plays one of the parents makes this movie a surprisingly good watch, as does the score by Manfredini. The makeup effects aren’t bad for what they are, the burn effect is actually pretty good for a low budget. The directing Kalmanowicz is pretty solid, sadly its the last feature film he ever did as a director he went on to work in sound editing working mostly on short films, documentaries and TV series, most notably on the Sopranos. On the whole I give this movie a 6/10 not great, but its really hard not like this movie, despite some of the unintentional laughs I got out of this movie. It deserves it’s cult status and I hope one day it gets a broader audience. Stay tuned for my next review, which will be my favorite bad horror film of last year, the Poltergiest of Borley Forrest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px4w9Vc2S9E
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