1989’s Beware!  Children At Play opens with a son and his father on a camping trip.  They’re having a great time, up until the minute the father steps on a bear trap and ends up trapped on the ground.  His son fails to open up the bear trap and, over the course of three days, his father slowly dies.  With his dying breath, the father tells his son to cannibalize his body after he passes.

Ten years later, a small town in New Jersey has a problem.  People, most of whom are children, are mysteriously vanishing.  Sheriff Carr (Rich Hamilton) has no idea what’s happening, which is especially frustrating as his daughter Amy is among the missing.  Sherriff Carr’s old friend, novelist John DeWolfe (Michael Robertson), comes to town for a visit and he discovers that the townspeople are being killed by their own children.  The children have been brainwashed by a feral teenager who lives in the woods, a teenager who calls himself Grendel.

Even as John tries to track down Grendel’s compound, the townspeople prepare to go to war against the children who are living in the woods.  Early on, an ill-destined traveling bible salesman refers to the town as being a part of the “New Jersey Bible Belt,” and it turns out that, just as the children are following Grendel, the adults are obsessed with their own idea of divine retribution.  Can John save the children from both Grendel and the townspeople?

No, he cannot.

Beware!  Children At Play opens with the Troma title card, which should be enough to frighten even the most resilient of audiences.  Like most Troma films, it’s violent and, at times, surprisingly mean-spirited.  The budget is low but the gore is grotesquely memorable, with characters getting chopped in half and used as scarecrows and every other horrible thing that you might expect to happen to someone on a farm.  As for the performances, it’s a typical Troma film, with everyone either overacting or underacting.  The townspeople shake with rage as they prepare to enter the woods in search of the children.  Michael Robertson attempts to change their minds by shouting random insults at them.  There’s a moment, at the start of the film, where John and his wife (Lori Romero) debates the merits of John’s books and the pedantic dialogue was so stiffly delivered that I nearly yelled at the screen.

That said, I don’t think anyone who sees this film will remember much about anything that happens before the film’s final ten minutes.  At the end of the film, the adults finally find their children and set out to get their revenge.  Those final ten minuets are considered to be some of the most controversial in the history of Troma, with Lloyd Kaufman claiming that they caused a mass walkout when the trailer for the film played at Cannes.  One could argue that the finale is meant to suggest that the children learned their evil from their parents but, more realistically, this is a Troma film and Troma has always understood the power of controversy to sell tickets.  The final ten minutes would be incredibly disturbing, if the actors were more convincing and if the special effects weren’t so cheap looking, particularly when compared to the gore effects seen earlier in the film.

Killer kids will always been creepy and they are certainly creepy in this film.  In the end, though, this is still a Troma film and never as disturbing as a film about a cult of killer children should be.  In the end, I could only ask myself, “Why does this stuff always happen in New Jersey?”