‘CHILDREN?’ WASTE OF A FINE CAST

“Where Are the Children?” (selected theaters) is a contrived, by-the-numbers TV-movie-like melodrama where morbidity and absurdity vie for dominance.

Jill Clayburgh and Max Gail play a happily married Cape Cod couple whose two adorable small children (Harley Cross, Elisabeth Harnois) are kidnaped by a bearded, heavily padded Frederic Forrest. If this weren’t a tragic enough turn of events, they are abducted on the mother’s birthday, which also marks the ninth anniversary that her first two children were found slain! The mother, whose first husband apparently committed suicide in grief, escaped conviction on a technicality.

In their adaptation of Mary Higgins Clark’s novel, director Bruce Malmuth and writer Jack Sholder never cause us to wonder seriously whether the mother might have been guilty the first time around. What’s more, it’s painfully obvious that Forrest’s gleefully crazed kidnaper is really the first husband and the actual murderer of his kids. By the time his twisted motives, both past and present, are revealed, it matters little because this film has long since become hopelessly preposterous. Whatever slight pretensions to credibility it had go out the window when an elderly man, on to Forrest, tries tackling him himself instead of calling the cops.

At the center of “Where Are the Children?” (rightly rated R) is the grim, extended spectacle of the kidnaper’s loony terrorizing of his two small captives, who mercifully are allowed to be pretty resilient and resourceful. Meanwhile, their mother awaits word of them in numbed anguish. Even more depressing is having to watch actors of the caliber of Clayburgh, Gail, Forrest and supporting players Barnard Hughes, Clifton James and Elizabeth Wilson mired in such dismal nonsense.