Although I have a wonderfully happy Christmas each year, there are of course those who dread the whole festive season. This nasty little shocker from 2008 should reassure them that, however painful one’s family Christmas can be, it should never get this bad. The people here really are hateful. Two families, one visiting the other, during the gap between Christmas and New Year, let their hair down and make merry. They bitch about their kids, make inappropriate jokes about each other’s sex lives and drink lots of white wine. But this all stops when their children start to behave oddly. Very oddly. Troublesome infants become killing machines when a strange virus starts to spread between them.
The horror that ensues is wince-inducing and hard to bear, as the parents realise that, in order to survive, they will have to fight back against their own children. As the hysteria rises, so does the body count. Everything is kept rather suggestive, making the viewer imagine the worst and see rather little. Nasty, messy and creepy, this is an edgy addition to the genre.
The Children (2008), directed by Tom Shankland, is released on blu-ray disc and DVD in the UK by Entertainment One, Certificate 18.
