Makinov's Come Out and Play is infuriating. It is unnecessary exploitative, and yet its exploitation leads to nothing but senseless crap.
The concept could have been novel. An American couple goes to Spain on vacation, visiting a small island a day after a festival. Once there, they find no sign of life except small children, who eerily pelt them with evil looks. They realize slowly that the children have murdered all the adults the night before, and that they need to escape if they want to live.
There's no shortage of gore in Come Out and Play. There's blood, dead bodies, and chopped appendages scattered around the island.
The biggest shock of the movie is that children can kill adults in the most gruesome ways possible. This reeks of exploitation. Watching the film made me feel queasy, not because of the violence, but because the child actors were made to participate in the bloodshed, however fictitious it may be.
There's this long sequence in the movie where several children are shown to be happily playing with corpses -- a girl stringing ears together to make a necklace, boys passing a decapitated head around like football, a girl holding hands with a detached and bloody hand, etc. etc.
These scenes may be shocking to see, but they all reek of chutzpah. It all feels like Director Makinov shot the scenes because doing so will give him horror cred, and not because they are necessary to the movie's plot. Exploitation 101.
I'm not knocking down exploitation movies altogether. Lord knows how I loved Tom Six's The Human Centipede, and even its wayward sequel.
Those who have seen The Human Centipede 2 can agree that the whole film reeks of exploitation, from the choice to shoot the whole movie in a muted palette, to the shot of a new mother stepping on her newborn. But there's a certain brilliance to that disgusting movie, and every scene of violence feels well-calculated. The film shines when placed side by side with movies in its genre.
Come Out and Play does not even come close. Aside from the unnecessary violence, it also apes what I hate about horror movies: characters that see the danger in front of them, but stupidly choose to ignore it until it is too late.
For a horror movie to work, the viewers must be able to relate to its characters so that they may root for them. Frankly, it is hard to side with horror movie characters who are so dumb.
Halfway through the film, I am already wishing for the main characters to die. And spoiler: they do, along with any hope that the movie is any good.
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