Shortening Some Holes

 

Welcome to the 15th Annual Shortening!

Yes, I've probably reused that joke. IT'S BEEN 15 YEARS.

What's a Shortening, you might ask due to its capitalization? February being the year's shortest month, me being a fairly short blogger, I have traditionally used this time to tackle movies exclusively featuring vertically challenged villains. Dolls, bugs, sloths, elves, and of course, one of my favorites and today's start, darn kids.

Quick Plot: An elite group of preteen boys attends a fancy version of summer camp. There they experience the usual activities: mud wrestling, capture the flag, bonfires. opera, and, well, as you might guess by the fact that this is streaming on Shudder, some horrors.

The Hole In the Fence is described in its synopsis as a take on Lord of the Flies, which is both enticing and more than a bit misleading. Anyone diving into this movie expecting a Who Can Kill a Child-esque ride will probably walk away disappointed, but in its own very different way, this movie is even more disturbing.

Directed by Joaquin del Paso, The Hole In the Fence is not a story about the evil lurking inside the young. It's actually quite the reverse: children might, by both nature and nurture, lean towards certain paths, but their real fate is mostly in the hands of the adults who guide them. The boys of Centro Escolar Los Pinos are, for the most part, wealthy, light-skinned white collar citizens-in-training. Like their chaperones, some may go on to become teachers or politicians or priests. All of these vocations are part of a system. But said system can't exist in its tiered structure without the bottom: the weak, the poor, the disabled, the victims.

The boys are told that their camp is a safe space located just outside a dangerous village filled with criminals that will rape and kill anyone better off. Though they do some charity giveaways there, it's made explicitly clear that they are not to venture outside their gate (though none of the boys seem overly interested in doing so). Things change when they discover the titular opening, a random exposure that suggests outside forces can find their way inside.

There are already other small tears in the fabric. A scholarship student stands out as the lone indigenous representative. Not surprisingly, he's the easy target of racist bullying. His only friend is a boy suspected of being gay, and when the more powerful kids turn on them, choices of loyalty are made. Another child with heavy injuries faces a different threat: a counselor with dark and abusive motives. 

The adults plant just enough seeds for their protoges to follow the same path that had, a generation before, been laid out for them. It's a cycle of violence, hatred, and hierarchy. 

So yes: not the BEST time.

The Hole In the Fence isn't a fun movie. Its horrors are societal and sad, and its 'thrills' are more a closing shot that feels like a punch to the gut. It will hurt. 

High Points

Directing two dozen children, many of whom are apparently not experienced actors, can't be an easy feat, but the results end up quite well. The boys are natural and haunting

Low Points

Considering the nature of one of The Hole In the Fence's only physical victims, it might have helped a little to have given the village and its inhabitants just a tiny bit more context

Lessons Learned

Page 666 of the New and Old Testament is more or less the same

As is true in any culture, continue to never trust men of the cloth

Chekhov's law of skinny dipping remains unbroken: your clothes will be stolen. Accept it

Rent/Bury/Buy

It's hard to say I enjoyed The Hole In the Fence, but easy to say I recommend it. Have at it on Shudder if you're in the mood for something dark and unsettling. 

What's the Matter With Kids Today?

Welcome to the Annual February Shortening! In honor of the shortest month on a blog written by a short woman, all posts are devoted to stories about vertically challenged villains. If you, reader of any height, have your own mini-horror to share, do so in the comments and I'll include you in a final post roundup as the calendar changes!

Quick Plot: It's a double date cabin vacation for two couples at very different points in their respective relationships. Thomas and Ellie are in a bit of a rut after a half-successful night experimenting with an open relationship (their weird little children Lucy and Spencer being weird little children aren't helping). Slightly more carefree Margaret and Ben continue to waffle on whether they want to be parents, particularly with some of Ben's mental health history.

These problems are nothing that a little nature hike couldn't fix, right? The group discovers a strangely alluring, incredibly deep cave that seems to have a particularly strong effect on Spencer. The next morning, the babysitting Ben awakens to discover the kids have gone missing. He tracks them back to their favorite new spot just in time to watch them both leap to their deaths. 

Or not.

Though Ben (and the audience) witness their odd suicide, Lucy and Spencer immediately appear back at their parents' cabin in a perfectly cheerful, none plummet-off-a-cliff mood. Ben is relieved, but his peace quickly curdles when realizes the kids aren't quite all right. 

You might even say, THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE CHILDREN.

We get quite a few more plot twists in the script by T.J. Cimfel and David White, all handled with great energy by director Roxanne Benjamin. For the first 45 minutes or so, there's some deeply unsettling tension. Is Ben cracking under the effects of lithium, or are his friends' children pure evil? And ultimately, which makes a more interesting movie?

For me, There's Something Wrong With the Children chose the wrong path, though I don't mean to imply that it doesn't fully work. The stretch where Ben (Zach Gilford, who's spent enough time in horror to know how to convey disoriented terror) and by extension, we are full on edge wondering how far these little monsters will go is incredibly tense. Granted, I'm a mark for homicidal minors, but personal preference aside, it's great stuff. And what follows is...fine. 

I won't spoil the last act or ultimate reveal. Much like with her first feature Body at Brighton Rock, Roxanne Benjamin nails a unique kind of tone that takes small human awkwardness into wickedly dark and funny territory. That feeling roars for There's Something Wrong With the Children's first hour, but once the main game is revealed and the plot kicks into cat-and-mouse chase, the surprises just aren't there.

High Points

I appreciate how much time and specificity is spent in defining both couples' current conditions, and perhaps more importantly, the four actors' skills at making their characters work as human beings even before they're running for their mortal lives

Low Points

The more you start to think about the nature of the actual villains and their specific decisions, the more some of There's Something Wrong With the Children's details start to become very, very fuzzy

Lessons Learned

Powder puff is girl's football for girls that don't want to have it called football

Generally speaking, it's better to get in a car than under it

When hanging around evil children, always drink out of sealed containers (actually, children are pretty gross even when not evil so apply this lesson to all manners of life)

Rent/Bury/Buy

At barely 90 minutes, There's Something Wrong With the Children feels like a brisk but swerving ride. For me, it was just one of those cases of a movie taking a turn in a different direction than my instincts, but that doesn't mean I'm the barometer on what kind of story we should have had here. It's enjoyable, but it also misses out on being great. Still worth a watch (currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+, which allegedly is a real thing). 

Coming of Age with Superpowers

Welcome to the Annual February Shortening! In honor of the shortest month on a blog written by a short woman, all posts are devoted to stories about vertically challenged villains. If you, reader of any height, have your own mini-horror to share, do so in the comments and I'll include you in a final post roundup as the calendar changes!

You KNOW we can't start a fertile February without planting a few bad seeds first. That's right! It's the evil child installment of The Shortening!

Quick Plot: Ida is a moody 9ish-year-old who seems to be eternally sour over her developmentally disabled sister Anna. When their family moves to a high-rise for the summer, Ida quickly befriends local psychopath Ben. 

Sure, Ida got some kicks from sticking glass in Anna's shoes and squishing  innocent worms, but Ben's idea of fun involves cat murder (thankfully, clearly not in any way harming the actual cat actor). The boy must die. 

That's easier said than done once Ben starts to display Carrie-like abilities. Meanwhile, another young neighbor named Aisha is experiencing some kind of psychic connection to Anna, helping the girl speak for the first time in her young life. What in the village of the damned is going on here?

The Innocents doesn't really tell you, and that's okay. Written and directed by Eskil Vogt (half of the team behind Thelma and The Worst Person In the World), this is an unusual film in the best of ways. There's an immediate undercurrent of something very wrong. Young Rakel Lenora Fløttum as Ida initially makes for the perfect bad seed until Ben proves to be far worse. As that unfolds, we get to realize our own mistake in how quickly we judged Ida. 

J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is commonly thought today as a celebration of youth, but what makes it so interesting today is how clear-headed it is at understanding the utter selfishness (and in Barrie's words, "heartlessness") of children. We love to romanticize the beauty of childhood innocence, but it typically takes us a whole lot of years of heartbreak to understand what cruelty is and how dangerous a thing it is to wield. 

The Innocents is fully aware that children's souls are a mess. Sure, a kinder kid like Aisha might already know right from wrong, but someone like Ida, who has clearly grown up resenting that her sister demands more attention from her parents, is still working through morality. It's not until she's fully confronted with what seems like pure evil that she starts to make decisions more in line with the light side.

There are a lot of ways to read The Innocents, and an analysis could go even deeper if you dig into the racial and gendered elements also at play. I'll leave that for another day, but in the meantime, check the film out and come back with your own takes. 

High Points

I'll always champion a strong genre film that makes effective use of daylight, and The Innocents is high on that list. Children are terrifying BECAUSE of how fresh-faced and innocent they look under the sun. Why bother to hide it with unnecessary darkness?

Low Points

I blame myself for having to break The Innocents up into three chunks to watch over the course of two days, so the odd pacing is more on me than Vogt. I was shocked when I realized I had reached the end of the film because, well, it feels a bit like something is missing. But how much of that is Vogt's unusual storytelling and how much is me watching under less than optimal conditions, I leave you to decide

Lessons Learned
We can whine about kids today preferring mobile devices to the outdoors, but tell me you still feel sad about that after watching this movie

When someone is mean, you tell a grownup

There are few ways to die that are sadder than doing so in the middle of boiling frozen hot dogs

The Good Son Watch

Considering how many times I reference this movie, I think it's time to make the callouts an official section. And yes, there are plenty of thrillers starring obscenely blond children that aren't The Good Son, but I can't help but think of it when a key moment of violence involves a highway overpass. 

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Innocents is yet another recommendation findable on Shudder. I don't know that it will please everyone, but it scratched my evil child itch in a wonderfully unexpected way.

Childhood IS Terrifying

While this website might have been born out of a passion for killer doll-based horror, I think I'm finally ready to accept that thirteen years into this blogging thing, homicidal children just might have clawed their way to the top of my heart, likely by slicing some porcelain achilles heels with tiny kid-sized scalpels. Whether it was Esther the Orphan's perfect curls or the Bloody Birthday trio's wacky antics, somewhere over the last decade, I've come to crave more monster youths than possessed toys.

Granted, part of that might be due to the requirements of both subgenres: anyone can shake a plaything around and call it a villain, but coaxing an actual performance out of a young actor is generally a far more challenging feat.

Now don't worry: as is tradition, we will indeed have ONE killer doll movie during February's Shortening. But today, today is for the kids.

Quick Plot: In 1957 suburban Australia, Celia Carmichael (the incredible Rebecca Smart) starts her ninth birthday with a batch of life-changing events: the death of her beloved, Communist-sympathizing grandmother, the arrival of the Tanners next door, and finally, the gift of her chunky pet rabbit Murgatroyd. 

If you're thinking "none of that sounds very horror genre-related", you'd be right, so let's address the elephant in the outback first: though she may rock perfect Rhoda Penmark braids, Celia is no bad seed. Much like Paperhouse (a movie that tonally feels very close), Celia is more whimsical childhood drama than horror, lightly filled with some fantastical elements tied to our title character's favorite, incredibly disturbing fairy tale. Shudder isn't really the natural place for this to stream, but you know what? I'm not complaining.

Long out of print (seemingly like most of writer/director Ann Turner's work), Celia is a special, special little film that deeply understands and achingly translates what it means to grow up. Honestly, that IS terrifying.

Celia is a sensitive, assertive kid, much to the chagrin of her bullish dad and subservient mom. She's instantly drawn to the warmth of Alice Tanner, the matriarch of her more liberal neighbors, whose own Communist ties sit poorly with Mr. Carmichael (though Alice's pretty face certainly doesn't). Between Australia's red scare and pet rabbit persecution, all the things that seem to bring Celia joy are threatened at once. It's heartbreaking.

So Celia copes with her fantasies. There's the recurring dreams of the dreaded Hobyah, goblin-like creatures lifted from Celia's favorite schoolbook (and yes, as the great documentary Woodlands Dark & Days Bewitched suggests, The Babadook definitely took note). An abandoned, terribly unsafe rock quarry becomes a playground for Celia and the Tanner kids, occasionally invaded by her snotty cousin with dire consequences. Celia deals with such slights the way many a spirited child might: by setting ritualistic bonfires and burning effigies of her enemies with the hopes that it will translate to real-world payback.

And eventually, it does.

I won't spoil Celia, which, despite being a fairly free-wielding character study, does indeed throw us a twist in the fifth act. But yes, at a certain point, something very big happens, and I suppose it can technically nudge Celia into the genre category (particularly with the VERY final scene, that almost reads like the preface to a glorious queen bee origin story). Celia is apparently often compared to The 400 Blows in how it taps into a child's perspective, but my mind went straight to the champion of the 2020 Shortening: Poison for the Fairies. Both films understand that to be a little girl means feeling in a very big way, that the world is as scary as it is exciting, and everything that threatens what you love is a danger the bravest must face head-on. 

 

High Points

There's so much to love about Celia, but an area that really elevates the film is the nuance that Turner brings to Celia's parents. Yes, her father is a brutish jerk, but he does indeed love his daughter (even if, like so many fathers, he'll never understand her). 

Low Points

I'm going back and forth on the rather shocking plot twist towards the very end, and while it sits better with time, I still think it doesn't quite get the room to breathe that it probably needs

Lessons Learned

In a world before ergonomic Jansports, the baby boomer generation of Australia likely experienced early onset back problems

Animals In Peril Alert

Bad things happen to adorable bunny rabbits and kids have to deal with the outcome and I'm saying this now so you're well-prepared because IT'S TERRIBLY UPSETTING AND YOU'VE BEEN WARNED

Rent/Bury/Buy

Rabbit funerals aside, Celia is a gem of a film. It's by no means an easy watch (nor really a genre film) but it's so worth the effort when you're ready for a heavy dose of powerful childhood anxiety. 

Problem Child

As a child who grew up with a deep affection for, well, murderous cinematic children, Mikey was the kind of holy grail of new releases. The poster's tagline was nectar to my young ears:

Remember, Jason and Freddy were kids once, too.

I haven't seen Mikey since that early rental from that now long gone video store, but seeing it appear on Amazon Prime felt like a true gift and ideal finale for the Shortening.

Quick Plot: Third grader Mikey is fed up with his adopted family, so naturally, he takes the easy way out by luring his kid sister to a drowning death in her pool, electrocuting Mom in the bathtub with a hair dryer, and beating his father to death with a baseball bat.

This all goes down in the first five minutes of the movie.

Mikey is a dark evil child film, one that makes The Good Son look positively PG in comparison. Once he's relocated to a pleasant childless couple, Mikey seems to temper his homicidal tendencies, behaving well for his teacher (Hellraiser's Ashley Laurence) and charming his neighbor pal (Nightmare On Elm Street 5's actual dream child Whit Hertford) and his hot older teen sister Jessie (Josie Bissett!). But the quiet suburban life can only last so long when MIkey's jealousy kicks back in.

Before you can wish him a happy Bloody Birthday, Mikey is back to his old tricks. One archery lesson and the kid's a better shot than Robin Hood.

Why is it always the sociopaths who learn the fastest?

Directed by former television actor Dennis Dimster from fairly prolific television writer Jonathan Glassner's script, Mikey is kind of jaw-dropping in its violence, matching the extremity of the much earlier Bloody Birthday in an era where you weren't really seeing that kind of style on the big screen. By 1992, the Video Nasty era had ended but left a certain border around mainstream horror, and the taboo of children committing such horrible acts was generally played more for comedy than scares. Yes, Problem Child's Junior is an absolute amoral black hole who's simply a sound cue away from being truly evil, but Mikey would still eat him alive.

It's hard to say whether I enjoyed Mikey or not. There's something so black in its nature that you're almost forced to appreciate how dark it goes, but the flip is that you're watching fairly pleasant people meet terrible fates. Oddly enough, I was heavily reminded of 1990's Child's Play 2, which also followed a smaller creature violently murdering supportive foster parents and suspicious teachers.

Mikey plays as a sort of end to the era of harsher horror. By the mid-'90s, slashers were dormant and most of the more violent stuff was sent straight to video stores (and edited by the unjustly bemoaned Blockbuster). I don't know that we needed more films like Mikey, as it really does seem to embody all the kind of awful things a conservative parent might use to justify movie bans. But it's an interesting remnant, a truly dark thriller that doesn't shy away from creative murder methods and humor so black you have to chuckle after the shock drains from your face.

High Points
I keep referencing Problem Child because it really does feel like the fun house mirror version of Mikey, but at least Mikey has the heart to allow its characters to treat the title villain as a kid in need of friends and family, where Problem Child has dialogue edits on television today because of its weird anti-adoption rhetoric. Everyone who meets Mikey says, "hey, cool! Nice people adopted a nice boy!" and you know, that's nice (until he decides to kill them)

Low Points
I can't decide whether it's responsible or reprehensible in how Mikey's script drops hints that its title character was abused. On one hand, there's a layer of heft in suggesting that a boy like Mikey was irrevocably shaped into a monster by what his parents likely did to him. On the other, if the film wasn't going to spend any real investment in making Mikey into a human being, it just leaves us feeling conflicted.

Lessons Learned
If you keep an appliance of any sort plugged in in close proximity to a large tub of water, you're really just asking for a monster child to kill you

To stop your pulse, just stick a ball under your armpit

Drowned little girls must stay in the water for several hours as the police conduct thorough investigations

Rent/Bury/Buy
Mikey is streaming now on Amazon Prime, and evil children completists like me really have no choice but to watch it. Be warned this is a very mean film, but '90s enthusiasts will enjoy the wide headbands and terrible bathroom decor. I guess there's something for everybody after all?