Occasionally seeing a movie that is bad, or does not match your personal taste or preferences, happens to all of us. It's no big deal. You sit through it, or stop watching early, and you go on with your life. But sometimes, and fortunately this is very exceptional, I come across a film I think is so bad - and hate so much - that it makes me furious! Movies that really annoy me to death on every possible level: the naivety of the main characters, the slow pacing, the endless dialogues, the fake pseudo-intelligence of the script, and the overall pointlessness of the story! All these things, and many more, annoyed me during "Don't Leave the Kids Alone".
Nobody knew anything about this film when it premiered at Brussels' International Festival of Fantastic Films. It had not yet been shown elsewhere, and there was little or no information in the press kit. Judging by the title, I was secretly hoping for an apocalyptic thriller/horror movie in the style of "Who Can Kill a Child?" (Spain, 1976), but alas...
It is a story about a single mother who leaves her two sons, aged 7 and 10, home alone one evening because she has to go to a party where she hopes to sign the deed of purchase of her house. The sons are both, each in their own way, suffering greatly from the recent loss of their father in a traffic accident in which all four were involved. The youngest, Emiliano, takes heavy medication and is afraid of everything. The eldest, Matias, is full of oppressed anger and aggression that he prefers to take out on his little brother. Not the best babysitter profile, in other words. Meanwhile, at the party, Catalina learns that the cheap house has several dark secrets.
Admittedly, the plot sounds quite ok, but it is not; - believe me. Why would anyone want to pay the price of a movie ticket to listen to the whining and complaining of two bickering children? Writer/director Emilio Portes often hints at supernatural situations, such as communication with the deceased father via a Ouija board and the presence of a murder victim's ghost in the house, but it's all nonsense. The bottom line is that you, as a viewer, can hardly restrain yourself from shouting at the mother to go home, and to punish the two little rascals.
