Come Out And Play released on home video on June 18th and you can pick up the Blu-ray at Amazon.
I found myself intrigued by Come Out And Play when it screened at Fantastic Fest this past year, but I wasn’t able to see it. So when the chance to cover it’s home video release came I jumped at it. What interested me in the film? I liked the concept of a mysterious island filled only with inexplicably murder-crazed children. And I was a little bit curious about this director, who goes only by Makinov and wears a mask in public to conceal his identity. And lastly, I had heard that Come Out And Play was a remake of a 1970’s-era film called Who Can Kill A Child?
Come Out And Play is more of an interesting film than it is a successful horror movie. The cast is incredibly small, with our main couple Beth (Vinessa Shaw) and Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) being the only real focus of the film. Beth is 7 months pregnant and the couple has two older children back at home in the US. Our couple is on some kind of romantic getaway that I feel like most 7-months pregnant women would likely balk at: an isolated boat trip out to a barely-inhabited island paradise in Mexico.
Francis appears to be fluent in Spanish and refers to having been to this island before. But not like this. When the couple pulls their boat up to the dock, there are laughing children swimming in the water and diving off the docks. But VERY quickly it becomes apparent to the viewer that something is wrong with this island. Unfortunately, it takes our protagonists some 20 minutes to come to a similar realization. Sure, they find the islands lack of adults to be weird, but they don’t really ever seem to act like any of us normal people would, IE leave the island immediately.
They only seem willing to accept the fact that this islands’ kids have become bent on murdering all adults when they watch said kids brutally murder an adult. Seeing is believing with these folks, apparently. Eventually the expectant couple teams up with a surviving adult who gives them a little exposition on what happened the night before on the island. Without explanation, the kids all awoke at the same time and began systematically killing all of the adults. The adults were helpless to defend themselves because, after all, as our survivor (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) specifically makes sure to verbalize: Who Can Kill A Child?
You want the answer to that question? You’ll get it before this movie comes to a close. I won’t go into spoilers beyond some of those initial plot set ups I’ve already laid out. But I will say that the movie is most successful in two areas. For one thing, it is pretty creepy to see packs of giggling and smiling kids doing terrible things. Not horrific, per se, but off-putting. This is an effective concept for a horror film when it all comes down to it (maybe that’s why it has been done twice already, and is a bona fide sub-genre to boot.) But the movie also grimly succeeds when little kids just start getting straight up murdered. Come Out And Play doesn’t shy from the child-gore, and you just don’t get to type a sentence out like that very often without being instantly monitored by the NSA. (Hi, Guys, how’s it going?)
So yeah, I enjoyed the basic framework of the film: that framework being giggling children who want to murder me. And when the climax gets real, you’ll see some disturbing gore unlike anything I’ve ever really seen before.
I will also say that I found myself thinking about the underlying meaning behind it all, too. And that’s a good sign, right? Are these murderous children supposed to be some kind of test for our protagonists to prove their worthiness as parents? This read on the film would have been much more effective if Beth and Francis were expecting their first child. Or is the entire island a metaphor for our primal societal fear and mutual distrust of the youth who will ultimately wrest control of this world from our aging grasp? Or are we supposed to take a lesson away from these crazed children? Like some kind of “Cat’s In The Cradle” message that we are neglecting our children and that if they can’t get our attention one way, they’ll try adult-icide next? Come Out And Play wisely avoids offering any explanation to what has happened to these children. We also can’t really be sure, from a plot perspective, if this same phenomenon happening on the island isn’t spreading to the rest of the world as well. I’d almost love seeing a 28 Weeks Later-style follow up that has this killer child phenomenon spread into Mexico City or something like that.
For the most part I enjoyed this film despite some real flaws. As I’ve mentioned, Beth and Francis often act compassionately as the film plays out, but they rarely act with logic or intelligence. I guess we would have no movie if they just bounced off the island at the first sign of trouble. But without a whole lot more time or effort, the movie could have escalated a lot faster and still allowed our characters to do smart things. Maybe another pass on the script could have been helpful. There is also an incredibly significant plot development that happens at the start of the climax of the film that is truly horrific in concept, but pretty much botched in execution. I don’t want to say much else for fear of spoiler-age but I think you’ll know the moment I’m talking about if you ever see the film. Just know that Come Out And Play really goes for the jugular in its climax and can’t pull off some of what it reaches for.
Depending on your level of tolerance for people making poor decisions in horror films, and your threshold for spooky kids, you could either be really entertained and creeped out by Come Out And Play, or frustrated and bored. I fell more towards the entertained side of things, but wouldn’t blame anyone for coming down on the other end of the spectrum.
I’ll close by noting that, while I guess a mask-wearing mystery director intrigued me enough to check out his movie, I don’t feel like Makinov warrants a whole lot of attention just yet. He seems to have single-handedly made this film as he is credited with writing, directing, editing, shooting, and capturing sound. And while I’m fairly certain it is impossible to do all those things, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt there. But wearing a mask in public and even while shooting the film? That reeks of marketing and “mystery box” theatrics to me more than anything else. But while his debut film is enjoyable, and he seems to be multi-talented, it feels to me like you don’t get to be a mask-wearing, single-Monikered auteur until you have a few features under your belt. (Okay, maybe it wouldn’t make sense to don a mask AFTER everyone knows who you are, but I think you get what I mean.)
The Package
Come Out And Play looks incredible on Blu-ray. The island paradise in the film is, in fact, a romantic and haunting location. The water around the island is a bright blue just begging for high definition photography. But while there are some beautiful images, I picked up a fair amount of artifacting and stuttering on some shots throughout the film. There were some slow pans that really weren’t smooth or stable and it felt more like an issue with the Blu-ray transfer or digitization process than a fault with the filmmaking. But I’m no expert. I just noticed a fair amount of glitchiness. That said, there are some beautiful things to look at here in Come Out And Play.
There’s also a Behind The Scenes Featurette, Cast Interviews, and Deleted Scenes. I’ve already totally forgotten the featurette. And the deleted scenes were weird in that they weren’t deleted scenes at all. If I recall correctly, they are actually all just extended scenes. The cast interviews were the only allusion to Makinov himself in the whole package. Both the leads were asked to talk answer the question: “Who Is Makinov?” and they give really weird answers. I just don’t get who this dude is or why we should care that he wears a mask. I judge filmmakers by their films, not by their theatrics. So I’m going to stop giving digital ink to the masked Makinov now and I encourage you to join me in evaluating his film based on the film itself, should you choose to check out this movie.
And I’m Out.
Originally published at old.cinapse.co on June 25, 2013.