When I saw the cover for Child Eater, I thought that this might be a good flick. You know, one of those few good B movies that slipped through the cracks. Unfortunately, this film was not everything that I had hoped for, but it wasn’t all bad. There are a few redeeming factors to this otherwise so-so movie that I wish other filmmakers would learn from.
Child Eater is a mix between Jeepers Creepers and every other horror movie with a scary human male antagonist. We find a young boy being stalked and terrorized by a so-called urban legend who has a pension for stealing eyeballs from his victims. Of course, the monster catches up with the boy, but he has a cast of people around him – including a victim of the monster – to help protect him.
One of my biggest gripes about this movie is that I could not figure out what the evil “child eater” was. In some instances, they portrayed him as the crazy old man around the corner, while in other instances, he was a full-on monster complete with elongated fingers perfect for plucking eyeballs. This discrepancy completely turned me off from the movie and even caused me to tune out a bit.
The thing that I liked about Child Eater is that it is shockingly about female empowerment. The movie starts with a young girl walking down a street alone. When a passerby stops to check on the girl, we see that she has been rather gruesomely injured and she replies, “He hurt me.” That little girl grows up to be one of the badass, shotgun-wielding protagonists of the film, going head to head with the monster. The other main protagonist is the babysitter, who in my opinion makes the movie watchable.
There is a scene towards the end of the movie when, to protect the child she is babysitting, the babysitter tussles with our villain. During the fight, the “child eater” plucks out our heroine’s eyeball. Instead of running away, or falling to the ground crying, or any other classic horror trope, our heroine grabs a handful of leaves and shoves them straight down the monster’s throat. It was refreshing to see a female protagonist who immediately fights back and does so in a pretty incredible way.
Apart from the positives above, there is not a whole lot to say about this movie. Child Eater is about as generic as it comes and not especially worth the price of a rental. There is no doubt in my mind that this movie is going to end up on Netflix or Amazon at some point so that I would wait for it there. Of course, if you really want to rent it I am not going to stand in your way. Just don’t blame me when you come to the same conclusion I did.