Recent viewings

Never Take Candy From a Stranger / These Are the Damned
I ordered this double DVD of 1960-vintage thrillers because someone on a listserv said interesting things about These Are the Damned.

Never Take Candy From a Stranger is an uncomfortable film, and I'm not sure whether to dismiss it as mere sensationalistic pandering. On the one hand, it's subject matter -- pedophilia -- is decidedly sensationalistic. On the other hand, the movie does not go out of its way to portray the child victims in a prurient manner, the actual offense is relatively tame by the standards of today's daily news, and most of the film's attention is devoted to one victim's parents as they attempt to goad the corrupt local government into prosecuting the wealthy and politically-connected offender. It all ends up as a courtroom thriller, in which the emotional state of a young girl facing a hostile, overbearing and manipulative defense attorney evokes as much tension as the fate of the defendant himself.

These Are the Damned is almost two movies in one, not quite seamlessly joined. It begins as the tale of an American tourist in a postwar English seaside town. Lured into a backstreet by the charms of a sultry local girl, he's promptly set upon, beaten and robbed by a weirdly well-organized gang of black-leather clad, motorcycle-riding "teddy boys". How weirdly well-organized are they? After apparently spending most of the day draping themselves over a 18th-century statue on the waterfront and scaring tourists, when their suit-and-tie-clad leader gives them a signal, they all get up and march in formation into the alley to await their prey, all whistling their bizarrely cheery theme tune in unison like the British POWs of The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Black leather, black leather, smash smash smash!
Black leather, black leather, crash crash crash!
Black leather, black leather, kill kill kill!

First heard in a rock-n-roll arrangement while Our Hero and his duplicitous date walk down the street, this happy little tune makes several thematic appearances throughout the film: whistled in unison as a marching song, above, and later whistled, this time solo, by various gang members signalling to each other during a tense nighttime stalk.

It's in the middle of this nighttime stalk that the movie shifts gears into a completely different story. A mysterious British military officer and his foreign mistress, who has arrived to take up residence in a guest house on his seaside property and pursue her artistic calling of creating strange lumpy sculptures, have made cryptic appearances earlier in the film, most notably as Knowledgable Locals to whom our bruised and bloodied American tourist commisserates after his unfortunate back alley encounter. Turns out they're not just background extras after all, and we're not watching a cautionary thriller about motorcycle gangs after all. No, there's some kind of sinister secret military base on the seashore, ringed with barbed wire fences and patrolled by soldiers with guard dogs. And the purpose of this military base appears to be to supervise a group of young children who are being raised in underground caves, educated via closed-circuit television, and visited only by soldiers in heavy protective gear.

I won't give away any spoilers, other than to note that the movie is based on a novel entitled The Children of Light, that the "teddy boys" so important to the first half of the movie are almost completely forgotten in the second half, and that with Hammer Films at the helm, the operant rule of horror movies -- "anyone can die" -- is in full effect, and British filmmakers do not, like many Hollywood filmmakers, insist on producing happy endings.