Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

dhainline1 "Who Can Kill a Child?" is a mid 1970s classic about a young British couple Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (the late Prunella Ransome) who are on vacation. Evelyn is pregnant with their 3rd child and the couple want a vacation before the birth. Tom and Evelyn have a young son and daughter named Richard and Rosie already. Spain seems like an ideal place for them, but then again, other people have gotten the same memo and the island Tom and Evie are vacationing on is lousy with people. Tom and Evie want to get away from the noise and happy chaos of so many people. He suggests they take a boat to Almanzora, an island he went to 12 years ago. The day Tom and Evie take the boat to Almanzora is simply beautiful! When they arrive on the island, they see the white buildings and young boys playing in the water. One boy is a solemn, dark-haired kid with a fishing pole, a basket, and a less-than friendly-attitude towards Tom and Evie. Things become more and more unusual on Almanzora. All the inhabitants seem to be children ages 12 and under. The thing that clinches how strange the island is when Tom and Evie see a young girl not yet in her teens steal a cane from an old man and beat him to death with it! Both of them are shocked by what this young girl has done and she seems to think beating an old man to death is some sort of game. Tom sees the village children use the old man as a piñata later on. The reveal comes about when Tom and Evie realize all the adults have been eliminated from the equation by the children. A father of one of the murderous children says the murders happened the night before. He is soon killed when his daughter leads him to his death. The dark-haired boy and a blond boy are the leaders of the murderous children. All it takes is for them to stare at good children in a sort of hypnosis to get the good children on their side. It's too late to save Evie's unborn baby from this weird kind of hypnosis. A young girl touches Evie's pregnant stomach and the baby kills Evie. Tom can't take it anymore. He shots the children down and the ones who remain chase him to the shore. Tom is going to leave the island when the remaining children attack. A police boat comes by and the cops think Tom is killing innocent children. The chief shots Tom dead and the children show the cops where the villagers are hiding. This is a ruse of course. The boys rob the police boat of ammo and guns and shoot the cops dead."Who Can Kill a Child" is a really good, creepy movie about children who can't take the horrible things adults do anymore (ie., wars, famines, etc). The kids hypnotize each other and this makes all of them do away with their elders. The setting is not a haunted house and the sun is up during most of the movie. The children are all creepy and most of them have benevolent smiles that hide malice. One really can't blame the children for attacking the adults. The beginning of the movie shows wars, famines, and children being eliminated in concentration camps. I can't help but think Stephen King must have seen this movie late at night and was influenced to write "Children of the Corn" because his story follows the concept of this movie. I recommend "Who Can Kill a Child" because it is chilling, creepy, and no one would think a beautiful island would be the home of a horror movie!

Rueiro A couple of British holidaymakers arrive in a small island off the Spanish coast, only to find the place totally empty of adults and the children acting in a sinister way. We soon find out that the children blew a fuse all of a sudden, and murdered all the grown-ups. Obviously, the little bastards are not going to let the visitors get away and spill the beans. Armed with clubs, knives, scythes and guns, they chase the hysterical pair all over the island, and the conclusion is quite predictable. This little film possesses a beautiful photography and an effective score to deliver the chills, but then there are a number of flaws in the script that weight against the story's credibility: who would want to live on an island too far away from the mainland when there is not a miserable telephone line or a radio to keep the islanders in touch with the rest of the world in the case of an emergency? What kind of a man would drag his heavily pregnant wife on a four-hour trip by boat in the blazing sun to stay for days in a place where there are not any medical facilities? And finally, dozens of bodies are lying all over the village in that sweltering heat, but still they don't decompose and stink but remain fresh and in pristine condition!!Nevertheless, it is a reasonably good horror film with an interesting story about kids from hell, and the children look quite sinister and evil. Nowadays we have seen so many movies about child psychopaths that this film may seem a bit lame to us, but we must think that when it first came out in 1976 it must have been quite shocking to audiences. I have recently seen the Mexican remake made two years ago, and it is virtually a carbon copy of this original almost shot by shot. If you want to remake something, at least try to make it better, use your imagination to improve the camera-work, take some time to revise the script so there will be not plot-holes the size of a bulldozer in it, and definitely get a bunch of kids who really look and act creepy and not like a kindergarten class!

ferbs54 In the 10/27/66 episode of "Star Trek," the one entitled "Miri," Capt. Kirk & Co. beam down to a planet on which all the adults have long since expired, and only feral children reign. Well, although taken from a wholly different source, a similar setup can be found in the surprisingly excellent Spanish horror film "Who Can Kill a Child?" (1976). But while a planetwide virus was to blame for the extinction of the adults in the classic "Trek" story, the film gives us an even more sinister explanation. In that film, we meet a young English couple, Tom and Evelyn (Lewis Flander, filling in when Anthony Hopkins' services could not be obtained, and Prunella Ransome), on holiday in the Spanish coastal town of Benavis. Tom is a biologist, while his wife--a beautiful blonde who almost resembles the early '70s Joni Mitchell--is pregnant with their third child. The couple hires a boat and goes to the small island of Almanzora, four hours off the Spanish coast, but when they arrive, they realize that there are no adults around; only dozens of giggly children. And this is only the start of a progressively nightmarish ordeal for the decent British couple....As I watched this film for the first time, the thought struck me that what we have here is an ingenious mash-up of Hitchcock's "The Birds" (1963) and Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), substituting young, fresh-faced moppets for the avian terror and the lurching undead. And in one of the interview extras on this great-looking Dark Sky DVD, the film's cinematographer, Jose Luis Alcaine, voices that same opinion. But whereas no explanation was vouchsafed in the Hitchcock film for the winged attacks (other than that order for a chicken dinner in the luncheonette, perhaps), "WCKAC?" spells things out for the viewer quite plainly. Interspersed throughout the film's opening credits, we see a good 10 minutes' worth of B&W documentary footage from the Auschwitz death camp during WW2, from the India-Pakistan War of 1947- '48, from the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and from Biafra...along with the numbered tallies of children killed in each conflict. Children, it seems, always get the worst of it in these upheavals, and this barrage of newsreel footage will make the viewer wonder why the young ones on planet Earth have not homicidally rebelled against all the adults even sooner!Featuring exceptionally fine acting from its two leads, meticulous direction by Narciso Ibanez Serrador, outstanding photography by Alcaine, and a creepily effective lullaby theme that permeates the film--alternating with the effective and realistic use of silence--"WCKAC?" is a minor horror masterpiece; a real find for the horror fan who thinks he/she has seen it all. The picture edges toward the supernatural as it proceeds, and Evelyn's ultimate fate is one of the most brilliant and shocking sequences in any horror film that I've ever seen (and believe me, I've seen quite a number at this point!). The film builds tension slowly, spaces its shocks wisely, and is not overly dependent on gore to get the job done, although it certainly does not shy away when the time is right. As Alcaine tells us in his interview, the picture was shot not in one island village, but rather, and incredibly, in four locations: in the inland sites of Madrid and Toledo, on the coast at Sitges and on Minorca, in the town of Fornells. Matching the harsh sunlight glare of the inland sites to the hazier light of the Mediterranean locations posed a problem, apparently, but the viewer will never be aware of it. I would have sworn that the film was shot in this one sunbaked island village, and could almost feel the heat rising off my television screen. In case you couldn't tell from my 10-star perfect rating, which I rarely give out, I absolutely love this film, and more than heartily recommend it to the discerning horror fan. Watch it for yourself, and then see if YOU can answer the tough question that the title poses....

Condom-full-of-Hatred It's been awhile since I watched anything like this, and I'm damned glad I stuck it on. Who Can Kill A Child? opens with a pretty grim montage and narration on modern war, and how the children are the worst victims of it. Que the 8 minutes of real war footage of dead babies and kids dying. We then kick into the film, which follows the happy couple Tom and the heavily pregnant Evelyn as they take a trip to Tom's favorite island that he spent time on as a kid. On arriving at the island, they notice things seem to be particularly quiet. No adults are to be seen, only the few local kids are walking about. Thinking they may be all over at a festival on the other side of the island, the couple make themselves at home in a café.Things are eerie enough, but when an old man suddenly appears in the street, things go to hell. A young girl beats the old man to death with a stick, all the while laughing to herself. Tom tries to stop her, but then a gang of kids steal the old man's body and play human piñata with him. Tom soon discovers a lot of adult corpses in houses, and when he finds a man in hiding, he explains that the kids went crazy the night before, going door to door slaughtering the grown ups. And nobody stopped them? Of course not, who could kill a child? From here on it's a deadly game of survival for the couple. The kids haunt them in gangs, and it comes down to the final decision, it's either the kids or themselves who are gonna die...Plot wise, there isn't a huge amount to go on, but that's not what the film is about. It's a film with bigger ideas than just straight up narrative, and it dangles those moral questions for the audience nicely. That's not to say the film isn't exploitative. The opening war atrocity footage will put a wide load of people off straight away, but the director, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, does a smart thing here. He visually forces you to feel uncomfortable at the idea or mentality it takes to stand by and watch a small child die,(which we all do every day in times of war, how many starving kids have you seen on TV??), so he sets you up straight away with the gut churning feeling of dread, with your own morality telling you that killing children is wrong. Sure, it's a cheap trick, but it's highly effective.The film builds the tension strongly until all the cards are laid on the table. The island, a once beautifully open and spacious place, soon narrows down to the streets, which soon narrows down to a room, leaving our heroes little place to run. With machine gun in hand, Tom must blast his way through the kiddies to make it to the boat, and safety. And blast he does! This one probably packs all the bullet sprayed minors and boat oar beaten kids that you will ever need! There are so many chilling moments here that I really don't want to ruin them all. One sticks clear in my head though, when Tom tries to help a woman who as fled to the village church. He finds the woman dead on the ground in the bell tower, and the kids attempting to strip her body of clothes. It's a shocking moment, just watching the cold nature of the children, doing a vile act out of what seems to be oblivious innocence. The climax is also a powerful one, and is up there with some of the great endings in modern horror cinema in my opinion.The camera work is crisp, and the photography spot on. Some nicely unusual choices in terms of framing really help sell the claustrophobic nature of the film too. There is very little bad I can say on this one really, I did find Evelyn's character to be a tad annoying though, and keeping her in the dark on what was happening just didn't cut it with me. Other than that, I say it's a modern classic. A grim one, but one that should be seen by every real horror fan out there!