Review of The Willies

A surprise even to me, I ended up liking this a lot, it's straightforward yet effective style really worked for me. It was like it had the charming simplicity of a children's spooky show, crossed with something that was much more ruthless and grim, it was like "Are You Afraid of the Dark" with real venom! For me it really blurred the line between what constitutes kid friendly and child nightmare inducing, like you had the blood and gore, not much at all but it was definitely there, you had the nauseating scene of the old lady taking a big 'ol juicy bite out of the fried rat, it had one use of the word s**t! And most noteworthy, it actually had violence and death perpetrated against young children! I'm not gonna pretend it wasn't, the acting was mostly terrible, especially from the kids in the wraparound campfire scenes(Sean Astin not included), and in the story of the kindly janitor who was really a monster in disguise who had an appetite for school bullies! I loved that, bullies and mean teachers simply being devoured, you'd never get that in a movie like this these days, it's not P.C. enough! A lot of the stuff that goes down in this picture is more than a little out there! I did find it to be moderately unnerving at points. Like when the kid goes to the school bathroom and the spindly fanged beast crawls out of the toilet, I sure wasn't expecting something so spooky and threatening to appear! And the story with the fat kid I liked best because I found something interesting and almost sympathetic about him, how his parents had opposite opinions about him, and how he only seemed able to communicate with other kids by playing sick pranks on them. I loved the bizarre visuals of his twisted little model town populated by dead flies, that was so striking and creepy! Very neat and weird, never seen anything like that. Nice grisly ending too, with the sadistic boy getting the 'wings' pulled off him in return! The effect of the giant flies was funky, but to me it was kinda scary all the same. And the movie's ending was quite mean-spirited also, those boys asked to know the truth and they certainly got it! I'm not saying this was a brilliant film or anything, it could've benefited from a third story although I reckon the vignettes could serve as that, but it was overall a fun scary time, its overtly dark elements make it notable amongst most other child horror movies that I've seen. No real Boo! type scares, it's more about gross sight gags and monsters coming to get you, which is fine and dandy with me from time to time. Oh my, the kinds of interesting tales that kids can tell... Give it a shot!