Who Can Kill a Child? (Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño?)
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador | Spain | 1976
107 min

A couple goes to a small island in Spain for vacation. They don’t want to go to a location full of tourists, so they choose a small island with only one hotel and barely any foreigners. The woman is pregnant and the man has an ugly 70s mustache. Once they get there, the island seems eerily quiet — the restaurant is empty, the supermarket is empty, and the hotel reception is empty too. They do see few children playing about but no adults. Hmm.  The first real shock comes when they finally see an old man except being beaten to death with a cane by a small child. Hmm. Something is wrong here.

The husband scouts the area and peeks through a door and sees an upside down adult body hanging in the air and children cheering and trying to cut him. More hmm. I think by now we should realize that the island is fucked up, and probably vanish.

With more scouting and investigating, the husband eventually figures out that something has happened that caused all the children to become murderous and kill all the adults and soon it will be their turn. Movie has a few creepy scenes and one particular which was really creepy, and killing children is always a very difficult decision for a filmmaker so great job on not shying away from that, but it is slightly unevenly paced. A movie like this needs to start off slow, build tension, but after things are exposed, it should not slow down. Unfortunately, the movie builds up steam and then keeps slowing down again, and this kills the panic the movie tries to portray.

Also, the movie somehow makes some kind of weird justification for the children being evil. It starts of the movie by showing actual footages of children being killed and starving due to wars. As in, we have been treating the children badly all this time and now its time for revenge. Or something. Doesn’t really make sense, since children are not exactly a different species.