From the review of Zombie Children of the Harvest Sun by Corbert A. Mince, Ghastly Ghoul Magazine, issue #343.
Moldavia Studios has never shied away from exploring the desecration of innocence. Witness Yolanda Deir Nasterfeld as the tortured twins of Conjoined Connie. In a rough-hewn, bleached-out world of human desperation, each Connie fights for control of their (shared?) soul, with one sister’s morality tried, and then eventually corrupted, by the other’s murderously nubile manipulations.
Then there’s Griffin Carlson (Abe Laybey) in Escape the Night. A lonely night porter with a penchant for the harmonica, he becomes a mass murderer overnight after succumbing to the demands of his vampire crush, Vanessa Van Reese (Chelsea Jewel), and isn’t above severing the head of his own stepmother with a hatchet to satisfy his lover’s bloodlust. In Hex on My Ex, heartbroken bookworm Trish Williams (Juniper Doss) tries and fails to ward off the seductive coven of witches down the street who have a lot in store for her cheating fiancé—provided she joins their gang.
These are all weak and wounded individuals, too easily swayed by temptation, too easily pushed down that well into the dark side. And it can be argued the very notion of what innocence is, and its slow dissolution, is as much a Moldavia trademark as calla lilies and crystal skulls. But is there anything more innocent than a child? And is there anything more chilling to watch than the slow, utterly realistic erosion of a child’s innocence unfolding on-screen?
Moldavia has done zombie movies aplenty: Undead Nocturne, The Famishing, Flesh of the Loveless, Carol’s Feast, Everyone Got Eaten on Christmas Eve, The Dead Don’t Devour, Zombie Dawn, The Dead Rise on Sunday, Plague of the Damned, Day of Decay, Prey For Me, Where’s Quentin?, Unburied, The Faces in the Trees (it can be argued) and even sort of . . . if you think about it . . . Druid Flu.
All of these are better movies than Zombie Children of the Harvest Sun: the writing is stronger, the pacing is tighter, the cinematography more striking, the costumes better designed, the settings more interesting, the direction less lazy; they’re more fun, less boring, and make more sense.
What all those films don’t have is Dario Heyward.
It’s no secret by now that Lucien Heyward cast his young son as the lead role in Zombie Children, for the first time directing one of his own children and for the first time directing a child at all. For now, let’s ignore the rampant rumors of a troubled production (a crew member was killed in a fall during filmings, there have been allegations of abuse) that managed to waft outside those impenetrable castle walls. After all, who really knows what goes on in there?
Moldavia’s last few efforts have been easily dismissed, and rightly; they’re weak. Lucien Heyward’s vision may be wavering of late, but it is extant. With Zombie Children, Heyward seems to have reined himself in from some of the heavy indulgences that plagued his last few films. Oddly, and maybe even subversively, the film he’s given us here is as much a character study as it is a straight-up horror. The horror is coyly intertwined with the grim fate, powerful sadness, and reflective soul of a country farm boy infected by a virus that kills the brain but keeps the mouth munching.
You’ve seen it all before: Heyward has taken every trope out of the zombie playbook, simply shaken it all up in a blender, and poured it out again. There’s a mysterious plague. People rise from the dead. People get eaten. More people die and get eaten. People run through fields. There’s barely a plot at all here to hang on to. What you haven’t seen before is the most genuinely harrowing performance ever put on-screen by a child, all the more so for its being completely and totally removed from the movie. It is its own entity, a separate generator, existing at once inside and out of the picture itself, daring you to forget about it.
Heyward plays Alastair, in a mostly wordless performance. As the son of grizzled, plow-pushing, unloving parents existing in a fuzzy future Dust Bowl, he’s the first bitten—by a half-rotted skeletal creature with loose tenderized skin (as always, the creature work by Jasper Raines and Barbara Pandova is outstanding) hiding in a hayloft. As the Alpha Zombie infects all his classmates in a bright-red schoolhouse that could have been whisked out of an episode of Little House on the Prairie (the movie either wants us to think it exists out of time or never decided on a time period), it becomes kids vs. adults in a sort of zombie retelling of Children of the Corn. Alastair reluctantly leads his undead mates on a messy crusade to lunch on all their cold, strict, uncaring adult guardians.
In its one unique though superfluous touch, the child zombies silently worship the sun, and take some sort of solace, even supernatural power, in its warm autumn rays. While this is never satisfactorily explained, it does provide some arresting images of predatory zombie children standing in a cornfield, hypnotized and recharging, framed by the large red orb of the titular harvest sun.
While the movie itself is terrible, what will elevate it to cult status is the idea of a zombie child (not lumbering and staggering like the zombies of lore, but quick, brutal, and agile) who is all too aware of his diminishing humanity, and abhors the monster he’s slowly becoming. Through the varying emotions that crisscross his face, we see a young character accepting that he will never mature; that he will never attain the wisdom of adulthood reached by even the weakest of his hapless victims. He is futureless, frozen forever in his undead adolescence. No other actor in the world could have portrayed this with such heartbreaking truth than Heyward, even as he’s strangled with a mostly unintelligible narrative. As the story unravels to reveal a specious nonstarter, we begin to realize this isn’t fiction: this is an accidental documentary about a father trying and failing to understand his own son.
This is certainly the most quizzical work done by Moldavia’s longtime cinematographer Jip Bekker. His tight, mostly handheld close-ups through backlit dust and grit are an arty departure for the studio, and mark a sharp contrast from the Dutch-angled medium shots of Moldavia’s past works. This technique is particularly effective in the Curdling—one of the goriest and most disquieting ever in a Moldavia film, but all the more frustrating because it feels common, and undeserved by the mostly lifeless eighty-six minutes that precede it.
Peeping Toms and internet fanboys may appreciate the unintentional airing of a mysteriously famous family’s dirty laundry, but watching as Heyward Senior, through the lens of his frank, searching camera, attempts to bond with his son is a grisly affair. Alastair begins wasting away before our very eyes—as if we’re actually witnessing Dario Heyward grow more and more disenchanted with his father after seeing him for what he really is. Is this art or entertainment? Horror or docudrama? Or is it meant to be both?
Besides the startling physical transformation of Alastair (the boy must have lost close to fifteen pounds during the course of the film, which wastes away his face and hollows out his eyes), the bruises and contusions that begin to appear on his face, arms, and neck seem all too real. If it’s Moldavia’s makeup crew that decided Ashcan Realism was the new game here, and moved boldly in that direction, perhaps they should remember their hammy B-movie roots. If Coreen Colchester (Ondine McPhaden) really looked like she was cannibalizing herself in Meat and Greet, would the movie have been as fun?
There’s a moment when Alastair realizes he can no longer keep going; something other than sheer survival takes over his instincts: beholding the beauty of a young, still-human girl. He sees in her the innocence he’s lost. By now, this young actor has plumbed the depths of his role so adroitly, even his breathing has become a staccato congested rattling of attempted inhales—the very sound and rhythm of life trying to stave off death. A single tear rolls out of his eye, down his nose, onto the face of this girl, splashing her unblemished skin in shocking slo-mo. Has he just infected her? Or is this the last drop of his humanity finally unleashing itself from his decaying core?
The moment is unforgettable, agonizing, blistering, and all too real.
But it isn’t much fun to watch at all.