• Directed by Pascal Franchot
• Written by Craig Mitchell
• Starring
  • Paula Cale
  • Antonio Fargas
  • Vincent Schiavelli
  • Asher Metchik

Oy. Is this what new-release horror films are reduced to? Threadbare cliches, setups without payoffs, payoffs without setups, and some sickly-sweet social conscience mixed in? If so, please take me back to the first wave of derivative slasher fare…

It seems, from the opening flashback (told with a soundtrack that tediously apes the Halloween theme), that in this nameless-but-perfect American town there was a creepy little kid named Milo Jeeter. We know he’s creepy because he sounded like Yoda, always wore a yellow slicker, and rode a creaky, ancient bicycle (good kids oil their bikes). He got five ten-year-old girls to follow him back to his gynecologist-father’s home office to see some fetuses in jars, but only if they’d let him (heh, heh) “play doctor.” Alas, he wasn’t interested in a simple examination; the first girl died in surgery, and a second got slashed across the chest.

Fast forward sixteen years to the present: Claire, the little girl who was slashed, is now doing thankless substitute-teacher work in Chicago high schools. She gets a wedding invitation from one of the other victim girls (who still all live in the small town) and drives back to find that the girl was just barely killed in a car accident. It also turns out that said girlfriend was a teacher of the ten-year-olds at the elementary school. Claire decides to stick around town and applies for the job, and apparently this is the only town in America with an actual shortage of teachers, because she gets the position immediately. Long scenes of her getting to know the class and win their trust while wearing shorter skirts than your teachers ever wore…. (Right about here I started talking to the TV: “Will you please Get On With It?!”)

Time to throw in cliches: She starts seeing a yellow-slickered kid on an ancient bicycle around town, watching her. And of course, when she turns away for two seconds to point him out to someone else, he’s gone when she turns back. He can even outrace her car as she drives recklessly through suburban neighborhoods.

So what does she tell her friends? Cliche #2: “Milo’s back! He’s back, and he’s still a little kid!” She doesn’t even try “Hey, some kid’s dressing up like Milo” — no, Claire goes straight for the crazy-sounding declaration and gets offended when no one (including her girlfriends) believes her. See, Milo apparently drowned in the river not long after playing doctor (was he chased there in consequence of what he did? It’s never really explained).

The entire first half of the movie dragged terribly, largely because the director (remind me to tell you a story about him) spends so much time setting up story angles that he never follows up on. For instance: Claire brings her goldfish to the school. The kids are endlessly fascinated by it (buncha landlubbers) and ask stupid questions repeatedly, like, “Can a fish breathe out of water?” So I assume (as any B-movie aficionado should), “Aha! The fish is a goner.” But no — the entire sequence only proved how dumb America’s schoolchildren are these days.

Another wasted setup: seems there’s a fish-smelling little kid in the class named Evan that nobody likes. (There was a fish-smelling kid in my class too, and it’s not an easy flaw to overlook in a friend.) Claire then starts seeing him talking to a kid in a yellow slicker. He even comes to school one day in a yellow slicker, on Milo’s ancient bike. “Aha!” says the viewer (that is, me). “Little Evan’s fallen under Milo’s spell because he has no other friends, and he’s going to contribute to the mayhem!” Well, he may be under Milo’s spell, but he doesn’t contribute squat — he shows up for another scene where Claire tells him “not to talk to that boy anymore,” then promptly vanishes from the story.

Anyway, Milo starts killing the other girlfriends, Claire acts like a psycho with the police, they start suspecting her, blah blah blah, let’s cut to the end: it seems that Milo was actually an aborted fetus that abortionist Dr. Jeeter (played by well-known bogeyman Vincent Schiavelli) had managed to keep alive and raise as his own (Why? Did he need to hear the pitpat of little feet?). Dr. Jeeter also managed to revive Milo’s bloated corpse when it was fished from the river (How? And when? Has he been living in the attic all this time? Or did he just revive him? If the former, why does Milo only decide to go on his vengeful rampage now? If the latter, how’d he do it and why doesn’t Milo look worse?).

Which means that Milo is only, really, a mean little boy (not, say, a Freddy Krueger-type ghost). So he shouldn’t be able to pull those “disappear in a second” stunts he was doing all through the first half of the film. And when Claire encounters him in the climactic showdown at Dr. Jeeter’s house (wherein, it must be said, she gets trapped in both the attic and the basement without ever finding the front door), he’s a very stupid little boy, butting into things with his head to display rage. Not the coordinator of the subtle mindgames going on throughout the entire film.

Another annoyance of note: we don’t see Milo’s face through most of the movie, and yet it doesn’t seem as if the director is trying to hide it — we see bits from the side, or from a distance. It’s almost like they don’t bother to show us. And when we finally see him, we can see why they didn’t bother; he’s just some fat, dumb-looking kid that should be playing a bully on Wishbone. To “fright” him up, they give his face a coat of liquid latex and grey greasepaint, but it just looks like a lousy makeup job. (You know who they shouldn’t gotten? That fat kid from Disney’s The Big Green — you know, the one who looks like a young Richard Lynch.)

Oh, yeah, remember I was going to tell you about the director? Well, his name is Pascal Franchot, and previous to Milo, all of his credits on the IMDb were for “best boy grip.” My guess is that’s what he’s going back to.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Vincent Schiavelli, “Dr. Jeeter,” was the holographic weapons salesman on the TNG episode “The Arsenal of Freedom”