Oh boy is this a classic, beyond classic really. It’s so rare that a movie so delightfully batshit will keep the momentum going from literally it’s first moments until it’s conclusion. Most have a lull, moment of lucidity or extended walking scene but not this one. This is a once in a lifetime type of movie and if this one strikes you as weird the one that came after it was even more so.
Most parents are concerned about the world their kids are growing up in but they usually think the solution is to fix the world…not Carlton J. Albright, auteur that he is. Nope, he thinks the kids should be the ones we eliminate.

Inhale a nice big cloud of yellow radiation and off we go;

Blaring horns, blare blarily as we open on Albright Pictures logo and a nuclear power plant, we observe two men on the catwalks talking about a drop in pressure, checking intake and outflow pipes and finding nothing wrong.
Ha!
One wants to go back to the control room and the other says that since the plant doesn’t pay overtime he’d rather go for a beer.
They drive off debating which particular bar they want to go to and we zoom into the plant with some ominous music and land on a leaking, rusted bolt which is spitting some hissing waste onto the ground causing a yellow cloud to cover the camera lens.

We get a title card which just says The Children. Originally known as The Children of Ravensback this movie went as The Children for it’s initial release in 1980 with the Ravensback being removed due to a misunderstanding where Carlton J. Albright initially had the idea about children who died at Ravensbrück concentration camp getting revenge.
This does not explain my beloved VHS copy having the town be called Ravenstock on the back…

Anyway, we follow a school bus turning into the road to Ravensback. The bus driver waves to a woman in a brown VW bug, she gives a merry wave back and drives on. We get a shot of the bus driving through a cloud of yellow smoke and the soundtrack craps itself.  We meet square jawed sheriff Billy Hart having coffee at a diner before setting off back to his office. On the way he waves to his deputy Harry who's smooching by the road with his gf who looks like a milky bar version of Daisy Duke.
Further down the road he finds the school bus run off the road, idling, with all the  doors open and no kids. The puff of radiation is gone also.

From here on it falls to intrepid Billy to find out where all these missing kids are, ably assisted by his Gal Friday, Frank Jr from Saturday Night Fever.
All the kids families have some kind of home life that I'm guessing Carlton Albright thinks is dysfunctional or he was trying to make them relatable? who knows

One seems to have a hypochondriac for a mother and she sits whacked on codeine by her doctor and possible girlfriend? it's hard to tell which one Albright objects to.
There's some swingers or porn stars smoking pot and the mother sunbathes topless and the stepfather works out wearing his tiny speedos and a glorious moustache,   one family where it seems the mother's crime is having a headache(?) and then Frank Jr's wife who smokes while pregnant.

The kids kill people via radiation, somehow emanating from their fingernails which are now black. After all the other parents, the deputy and his Milkybar gf are barbecued, the house of Frank Jr and his wife becomes a last stand situation with the kids all trying to find ways in.
Billy discovers that they are also now immune to bullets but cutting off their hands kills them.
Good job that Frank Jr has a pair of swords on his wall.


The ending twist is kind of interesting and certainly made me go "oh no"

People always go too hard on this one I feel, where some of the ‘bad’ movies such as Manos are totally devoid of plot, sense or purpose this one isn’t. Whether people got it or not this movie had something it was trying to say.
The Yankee Rowe power plant had a leak in 1979 which influenced the movies theme.
Not just that children may have died but what if they hadn’t and were affected by the radiation in other ways?
There’s a motif in the movie about the consequences of the adults behaviour on their children, even Sheriff Billy who had no kids of his own turned a blind eye to things he should’ve been enforcing such as poaching, pot smoking, and the like that was obviously lingering in someones mind about how the negligence of adults could’ve led to a Chernobyl before Chernobyl.
In Chernobyl’s aftermath many animals were mutated, some profoundly and some only in a minor way, the power of radiation to cause mutations has always been noted. What if the mutation effected the adults indirectly as their actions indirectly mutated their kids?
The classic reap what you sow story with the hokey science fiction of the 50s and the bad seed trope of the 70s.
While it’s certainly not winning Oscars it shouldn’t be put in the same category as something like Troll 2, it’s more of a C.H.U.D.

This movie leaves a lot of questions like;
Why did the kids turn into that? Why do they make that noise?  How DID the bus teleport? Could the kids teleport? Is the tri-state area also having this trouble?
The answers to all the above are “No idea”


Interesting things-

A recent transfer by Vinegar Syndrome came with a deleted scene thought lost to time, that was nice.

Harry Manfredini scored this before Friday the 13th and it's more or less the same score.

The guy playing a drug dealer actually was a drug dealer.

Most of these people never worked again.