Review by Ben Bussey
As The Offspring once told us, you gotta keep ’em separated – and indeed we must, when it comes to horror remakes. We have to sort the likes of Franck Khalfoun’s Maniac from the likes of John Moore’s The Omen; the ones that actually have a new and interesting take on the source material (or at the very least made a genuine effort to do so) from the painfully uninventive retreads which constitute nothing more than a quick cashgrab. Now, in the brand name recognition stakes, Who Can Kill A Child obviously can’t hold a candle to The Omen, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and so forth, which might explain why the makers of this remake decided to rechristen the film Come Out and Play (having apparently been first entitled Child’s Play, an astonishingly dim-witted choice which would have prompted tremendous confusion). Are the people behind this film expecting the general public to be aware of the original film? Or, as I cannot help suspecting, are they counting on them to be ignorant of it…?
Well, I can’t abide the latter, so: ladies and gentlemen, if you have never seen or heard of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s 1976 film Who Can Kill A Child, please allow me to alert you of its existence. It’s the story of a thirtysomething couple who visit a remote Mediterranean island only to find it populated by evil children who have murdered all the adults, and it was released to DVD by Eureka almost two years ago. While it’s hardly a masterpiece, it’s an efficient shocker – and in form, content and aesthetic, Come Out and Play is almost an exact facsimile. I suppose there’s a certain inherent laziness to almost all remakes; the bulk of them will directly recreate at least a few key moments from the original, in a manner which usually prompts a groan and a mutter of “why do they even bother?” But Come Out and Play takes it to another level. It’s practically Gus Van Sant’s Psycho all over again, replaying the original beat for beat, and at some points almost shot for shot, yet somehow failing to carry over even the slightest hint of the original’s soul. (For a frame of reference, watch the trailers for the films back to back here.)
Actually, I may be doing a disservice to Van Sant’s Psycho there: that film was an entirely self-conscious exercise in duplication, and the audience was never expected to be unaware of the similarity. A better frame of reference might be Halloween; like Rob Zombie’s rehash, Come Out and Play contains almost identical action to its source material with almost identical shot composition, and almost identical-looking actors in almost-identical costumes wandering around almost identical sets, but all the while harbouring some delusion of being… wait for it… ‘darker’ and ‘edgier’ than the original. (Facepalm.) Yet where Zombie’s rehash may have at least stood apart a little given how heavily it upped the brutality, Come Out and Play does not stray from the parameters set by Serrador’s film in any way whatsoever. This being the case, it only serves to make the director Makinov and his/her/its attempts to craft an image as an enigmatic, anarchic visionary – wearing a mask, using a code name – seem all the more laughable. I’m not going to link to any of Makinov’s self-aggrandising bollocks here (you’ve got Google for that), but I can only hope this person is concealing their true identity to avoid the shame of being responsible for such a lifeless turd of a film, and/or is just taking the piss. If not – dear me, someone is seriously deluded.
However, Come Out and Play doesn’t fall flat simply by comparison with Who Can Kill A Child. I doubt even those unfamiliar with the original will find much to admire here. Again in common with Rob Zombie, Makinov seems to think that shooting in a pseudo-naturalistic style will excuse your script for every risible line of dialogue and fumbled attempt at characterisation. Needless to say, it doesn’t work at all. As the pregnant wife plunged into a nightmare, Vinessa Shaw is on over-familiar ground, having played a very similar role in Alexandre Aja’s version of The Hills Have Eyes; somehow her presence here only boosts the feeling of remake exhaustion. (Plus, she’ll always be the girl from Hocus Pocus to me.) Meanwhile, I’m left feeling a bit sad for Ebon Moss-Bachrach; he’s clearly trying his best as the shell-shocked husband forced to consider the unthinkable, and to be fair he doesn’t do a bad job, but it was never going to be enough to save this film from mediocrity.
Perhaps worst of all, Come Out and Play is utterly in denial about the sort of film it really is. Who Can Kill A Child never made any mistake about its exploitation status, hurling good taste out of the window from the word go by opening on an utterly irrelevant montage of genuine historical footage, featuring numerous real images of dead children. A bit much, obviously – but by contrast, Come Out and Play is positively neutered, coming off almost wilfully determined to neither show children inflicting nor receiving harm. It takes a great deal to shock in this post Serbian Film climate (on which note, hope everyone’s forgiven my silly April Fool’s prank), and Come Out and Play never comes close to being disturbing. Perhaps the intention, instead, was simply to create a tense atmosphere, based not on nastiness but suspense. I should think you won’t be surprised to learn it’s a fail in that department too.
In so many respects, Come Out and Play is the worst kind of exploitation. It shamelessly apes an existing film, hoping the audience will be unfamiliar with the source material; it sells itself on shock value, but stops short of showing anything remotely shocking; and all the while, it harbours delusions that it is in some way an ‘important’ film. Guess what: it isn’t. At all. Don’t waste your time on it.
Come Out and Play is in select UK cinemas on 3rd May, then Region 2 DVD on 6th May, via Metrodome.