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This movie succeeds at what so many other genre movies attempted but failed at. The movie by all means is just like any other genre entry from the '70's but yet it manages to excel and rise above the normal level of standard that is customary within the genre.

It's because the movie gets basically everything right. Or at least its most important genre aspects. What makes the movie foremost work out as an effective one are its children. Over the years lots of horror movies featured children in it, that were supposed to be the movie its most scary and threatening aspects. This however only successfully worked out in just a handful of movies, which is mainly due to the children not always being the greatest actors or just not looking very threatening at all. But the children in this movie are surely threatening ones! You can basically see this movie like a typical '70's zombie flick, with as a difference that the zombies are being replaced by normal looking children this time around.

They are really like animals, hunting down and tricking their preys. It's not a very gory movie, like basically none of the Spanish genre movies from around that time really were, especially when compared to the Italian ones but it's being effective in more other horror ways. It often uses a great build up and sets some of the sequences up nicely, in which the children all really come across as dangerous, even though they are all little, cute looking ones.

It must had made the movie really controversial at its time, especially since it shows the children doing things you have probably never seen before in any other sort of movie. It can be a quite brutal movie, especially with its opening and ending.

The movie opens with real news footage of children who were killed during wars, such as in WW II concentration camps by the Nazi's. Seriously, this is stuff we didn't even get to see in "Nuit et brouillard" and its being quite graphic to look at because you know that what you are watching is all real. I don't think this opening was really necessary to be put in the movie and it seems mainly put in for its shock value. It sorts of set up for the motivation for the children to become cold blood killers in the movie but it's not really something that gets build on or explored further. The movie just doesn't do too much with its story and it actually is all pretty standard stuff when it comes down to its writing.

It's also a movie with plenty of slow moments in it. It actually isn't until half way through the movie that things really start to take off, when they finally get to the island and have their fist unusual and dangerous encounter. It's still a movie that does a lot wrong and also had a low budget working against it but in the end none of this really matters, since "¿Quién puede matar a un niño?" is a movie that works out surprisingly well within its genre.

By all means, this shouldn't had been a movie that worked out but yet it all did. I think that is the biggest compliment you can give this movie.

8/10

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About Frank Veenstra

Watches movies...writes about them...and that's it for now.
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