CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED

Anton M. Leader, 1964

Starring: Ian Hendry, Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris

A psychologist, Tom (Ian Hendry), and a scientist, David (Alan Badel), are working together on a study examining childhood development. They are fascinated when they come across the case of a young boy, Paul (Clive Powell), with remarkable mental powers and a very strange personality. They track down his mother (Sheila Allen), who ultimately reveals that the child forces her to do things, perhaps telepathically, and that she can’t stand to be around him because she was a virgin when he was conceived. Though they are reluctant to believe her story, they soon realize there are five other children from across the globe — countries like China, India, and the Soviet Union — who exhibit similar powers and soon run away from their respective embassies and gather together in an abandoned church in London. As government officials and British Intelligence close in, Tom and David attempt to prevent ultimate destruction.

This sequel to Village of the Damned is less of a direct follow up and more a film that happens to be set in the same universe. There are the requisite parallels, namely the fact that the children were all the result of virgin births from human mothers, they have a superior intellect, share knowledge, and are apparently telepathic. Where they different from the children in the first film is that, for starters, they don’t look alike: instead they represent a range of nationalities. They also seem to be more human than alien — some cockamamie explanation about blended DNA is given — and here they are clearly meant to be sympathetic. It’s actually the film’s saving grace; they recognize that they have no place on the earth and, once their true natures are revealed, will drive humans to desperate acts of fear-based violence despite their efforts to remain in obscurity.

This is also more overtly a Cold War-themed film, though its League of Nations approach to the second half of the plot hasn’t aged particularly well. It’s amusing to think of this set up in comparison to the last fifty years of cinema and television; somehow the British military (and intelligence service) have spearheaded a mission to kidnap or destroy the children that involves a number of embassies and diplomats, but is basically run by two scientists who just barge on the scene and do whatever they want (especially Ian Hendry’s Tom, though he’s known for this sort of arrogant kind of character, so either I’m just used to seeing him in a role like this or it really is plausible). There is an effectively moment when orders become confused and the different British regiments are basically firing on themselves, but overall it feels a bit ridiculous.

There are some eerie Quatermass and the Pit-like moments — particularly a scene where a child is killed and later raised from the dead — but overall the film beats you over the head with its anti-war/anti-nuclear terror message. The instances of the children forcing adults to become violent are a bit more ridiculous in this second film and I think someone was asleep at the wheel with those sequences, though part of the problem is that they don’t really seem to fit in with the film’s underlying thesis that the children aren’t inherently violent or dangerous, but will protect themselves when necessary. There is, however, a grisly sequence when British officials (it seems like a mix of military and intelligence) arrive to kidnap the children — who are newly arrived at the abandoned church — and they force the men to brutally murder each other.

Despite effective sequences like that one, there is a lot that patently doesn’t make any sense. Where Village of the Damned introduced some interesting religious themes, only to throw them away by the second half, Children of the Damned does something similar with its central location of the abandoned church; the children use parts of the structure to build an insane mega-weapon to defend themselves. If they’re so smart, surely they could have constructed something a little simpler and more innocuous? When the government officials realize they could use the children’s device — and the children themselves — as powerful weapons, they change their tune and immediately roll out every excuse from patriotism to common sense to try to get the scientists to convince the children to come on board. And while the first film has an admittedly downbeat ending, this one attempts to be more tragic in tone and winds up being a bit too sentimental and moralistic for my taste. Mild spoilers: the film more or less ends with someone postulating that the children are not alien at all, but advanced humans who have arrived before their time.

I don’t know that I can really recommend Children of the Damned, though it is an interesting film and it’s worth tracking down if you like atomic horror, British sci-fi, or weird children’s movies. It’s available on DVD as a double feature with Village of the Damned. Though I do have to admit that Losey’s These are the Damned is still my favorite “evil alien/atomic children” film — and perhaps you should make a triple feature out of these three — but hey, it’s Joseph Losey. Nothing against Village of the Damned’s director, Wolf Rilla, or Anton M. Leader, but come on now. Joseph Losey.

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Otto Preminger, 1965
Starring: Carol Lynley, Keir Dullea, Laurence Olivier, Noel Coward

The young Ann (Carol Lynley) has recently arrived in London to live with her brother Steven (Keir Dullea). On her daughter Bunny’s first day of school, she’s harried after a day of preparing their new home, but when she arrives in the afternoon to retrieve the girl, Bunny is nowhere to be found. Apparently she never made her way to her classroom and no one has seen her. An assured detective, Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier), attempts to unravel the mystery of the child’s disappearance, but quickly realizes no one outside of Ann or her brother has seen Bunny and there is no evidence of her existence at all. Otto Preminger, an Austrian émigré who escaped a war-torn Europe for the US like so many other prominent directors, actors, artists, and writers during the ‘30s and ‘40s, is one of those names that deserves more attention and while I have yet to see all of his films, he’s become one of my favorites of the years. Certainly titles like his seminal film noir Laura (1944) and courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) are considered classics, but he frequently pushed the boundaries of Hollywood censorship when he tackled themes like infidelity (nearly all his films feature a love triangle), homosexuality, drug use, and rape. Many of his films are concerned with a man’s perverse obsession with a woman; in addition to Laura, this figures into Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), and of course Bunny Lake is Missing. My favorite of all his films, the majestically bleak Angel Face (1952), turns this on its head and features a pathological woman who is obsessed with a man, resulting in one of the most nihilist — yet still oddly romantic — entries in all of film noir.

My favorite of Preminger’s films fall under the loose thriller umbrella, which is certainly where Bunny Lake is Missing belongs. And it is one of those thrillers that subverts the standard murder mystery trope; instead of operating on the premise that someone has been murdered and a killer must be located (before killing again), the film focuses on a character who is missing and follows a protagonist who is soon confronted with the possibility that no one except for them knows for certain that this character is real. Films like Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Terence Fisher’s So Long at the Fair (1950) fall under this umbrella and are all, in one way or another, based on an old urban legend that has turned up in fiction, film, and television over the years (I first encountered it as a child in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark).

On one hand, I find this premise really annoying; it’s just seems so improbable that not a single person would have witnessed the existence of the missing character — Hitchcock deals with this particularly well in The Lady Vanishes — but there is something about it that’s frightening in a primal way. What makes this (admittedly tiny) subgenre so effective is that the real crux of the film is not really whether the missing person will be located or who is responsible for their disappearance, but whether or not the protagonist is sane or insane. Preminger handles this particularly well in Bunny Lake is Missing and in that sense it ties into films about characters descending into madness and would fit in well with some of the similar thrillers made by directors like Hitchcock, Polanski, and De Palma.

But where Bunny Lake is Missing is so brilliant is in its use of a series of truly demented characters who surround Ann and the case of her daughter’s disappearance. Even the English band The Zombies make an appearance and while I love them, it’s a bit out of place to hear their songs pop up on the radio or to see them performing on television within the film. I don’t want to give all these character tidbits away, but one particularly delightful example features Martita Hunt (of one of my favorite British films of all time, David Lean’s Great Expectations) as a retired headmistress who lives in an attic room playing back recordings of children’s nightmares that she’s collected over the years. I could not make this up if I tried. But the oozing, decadent cherry on the cake is undoubtedly Noel Coward as Ann’s invasive landlord who works as an announcer for the BBC. At one point he brandishes a whip and claims to own the Marquis de Sade’s skull — all while clutching an enfeebled chihuahua named Samantha on his arm — and he tries to seduce Ann with his “melodious voice,” telling her that she should “sample the wine” before so hastily attempting to return it to the cellar. It’s maybe the greatest thing I’ve ever seen and I demand to know why there wasn’t a spin off film starring his character. It’s one of the great injustices of this world and by god, if I have to write that script myself, one day I will.

Last but not least is Keir Dullea — who will always and forever creep me out whenever I see him on screen, probably thanks to Black Christmas, or maybe just the fact that he looks like he’s plotting everyone’s death in some horrific way regardless of the role he’s in — as Ann’s brother, though I don’t want to spoil the surprise where he’s concerned. Needless to say, one of the film’s themes is among my favorites — incest — and in this way it ties in neatly with a handful of British horror films from the period that dealt with perverse family relationships and demented male protagonists stuck halfway between pathological violence and arrested development.

Of course no one can compete with a weary-looking (and apparently quite ill at the time) Laurence Olivier, despite the fact that he delivers a subtle, understated performance and is clearly not trying to steal the film from the other actors. He’s not really an eccentric figure, but is the calm, steady center of the film around which all of them — including Ann — swirl as the narrative moves increasingly into madness. Apparently it’s notably different from the source novel, by Merriam Modell, but wouldn’t be a Preminger film without his distinctive use of suspense, madness, gender conflicts, and good old fashioned human perversion.

And while Bunny Lake is Missing is one of Preminger’s more ignored films and received mixed critical reviews, I really love it. As with many of his best works, it looks absolutely beautiful, has a wonderful score (jazzy, but also vaguely threatening, from Paul Glass), and a title sequence from Saul Bass that is glorious (as is basically all of Bass’s work). Pick it up on Blu-ray, though I demand to know when someone will release a special edition box set of Preminger’s thrillers.

I START COUNTING

David Greene, 1970

Starring: Jenny Agutter, Bryan Marshall, Simon Ward

The 14 year old Wynne (Jenny Agutter) realizes she is in love with her stepbrother, George (Bryan Marshall), who is in his early thirties, and her sexual awakening just happens to coincide with the emergence of a serial killer who is murdering young women in the area. Wynne comes to suspect that George might actually be the killer, thanks to his suddenly mysterious behavior, which includes lying about his whereabouts, scratches on his back, and a bloody sweater that he attempts to hide in the garbage. He also disapproves of Wynne spending a lot of time at their partially burnt-out old house, which Wynne and her friend Corinne (Clare Sutcliffe) pretend is haunted, because George’s fiancee died there in an accident years ago. But the more investigating Wynne does, she finds herself closer and closer to the killer...

Based on a novel by Audrey Erskine Lindop, I Start Counting is really more of a psychological thriller than a proper horror film, though it’s something of a spiritual successor to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) — about a young woman with latent amorous feelings for her uncle, who she suspects is a serial killer — with shades of eerie Australian masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), though of course the latter wouldn’t come out until a few years later. But speaking of Australian films, this was an early starring role for the mesmerizing Jenny Agutter prior to her career-making performance in Walkabout (1971), which is also something of a coming-of-age film set in the Australian outback.

Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Shadow of a Doubt, and I Start Counting are all concerned with depictions of teenage sexuality — specifically emerging female sexuality and the potentially violent effects of its repression. Like some of the other British psychopath films of the time, I Start Counting intertwines fantasy and reality, but with an interesting twist: from the perspective of a potential victim rather than the killer. It was apparently somewhat shocking for the time, but there is nothing graphic about the sexuality on display here and (outside of a sex scene that Wynne stumbles into, to her horror), there is not even much implied. That’s not to say that director David Greene’s (The Shuttered Room, among many other more mainstream titles) use of this theme isn’t impactful and, in a sense, the film also reminded me of Romero’s Season of the Witch (1973), where the film’s horror genre themes emerge from an unhappy character’s boredom with their dull homelife. For Wynne, this is compounded by puberty and I Start Counting is a compelling portrait of the jarring, notably melancholic shift from childhood into adolescence.

And this is actually the primary focus of the film: the undertones of sex and morbidity just happen to coincide with the off-camera actions of a serial killer. This figure serves less as a major plot point (or side plot) and more as a symbol for the confrontation of past trauma with repressed desire. There is a brief glimpse of a girl’s body under the water — perhaps a reference to Night Must Fall (1964), which also opens with the murder of a girl near a riverside — but, as with Shadow of a Doubt, the central characters are made up of a female “detective” and her family: a nagging, clueless mother and a male relative obsessed with the crimes. Wynne’s slightly older, teenage step-brother has a folder where he collects all the press on the murders. He utterly some (perhaps unintentionally) hilarious lines like “If he’s going to kill all these people, he could at least rape them, it seems like such a waste.”

It’s perhaps unusual to have what is essentially a film about a young psychopath — like the countless titles made in the wake of Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960) — told from the perspective of an even younger female protagonist. Though the basic script from Richard Harris — no, not that Richard Harris — is the only real flaw and it could have stood a bit more development, it makes great use of the fact that Wynne is still finding her way in the world and the agony she feels over her love for George is tangible. There are a few comical scenes, most of which involve her absolutely horrible friend Corinne, including one where she and Corinne discuss sex during mass and another where Corinne insistently shouts that she has had sex seven times. Seven times! If you’ve ever had a friend who was actually quite nasty to you (as teenage girls can often be) and was aggressively jealous, this captures that perfect. Corinne even tries to seduce George, which sets in motion the concluding tragic events, though I will restrain myself where spoilers are concerned.

I Start Counting has been almost totally ignored — particularly compared to other British psychopath films — and, as far as I can tell, it’s not yet available on a proper home video release, something that needs to be rectified as soon as possible. It deserves a restoration and a Blu-ray release with plenty of special features. If you’re a fan of Shadow of a Doubt, this would make an interesting double feature with either that or Picnic at Hanging Rock, and anyone who loves Agutter — and particularly in her early years, you’d have to be a monster not to — should seek this out immediately. Though I shouldn't give it all to Agutter, though she is phenomenal. Bryan Marshall (The Long Good Friday) has great chemistry with her and is perfectly used. Between the two characters, and especially in their interplay together, the film's stretches its legs and explores a profound sense of fantasy, longing, and emotional restraint that means that a lot of non-horror fans will also find a lot to love here.

WITHNAIL AND I

Bruce Robinson, 1987
Starring: Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths

The first time I saw Withnail and I was a few years ago when I began my crusade to see and own every Criterion film ever made. While that battle is still on going, I like to revisit my favorites time and again. I'm a compulsive re-reader and re-watcher and I'm not ashamed. With Withnail and I I'm happy to say that the humor, acting, and charm has held up. However, a couple of years later, as someone who does a lot of drinking and spends a lot of time around other people doing a lot of drinking, it is, if anything, a hell of a lot funnier. Or at least more relevant. And vaguely depressing.

Richard E. Grant plays the titular Withnail. Though he claims to be an actor, this hilarious, disaster of a drunk uses his considerable intelligence and wit to look for booze, drink it, and then deal with the inevitable hang overs instead of acting or going on auditions. Paul McGann costars as his unnamed roommate, a nervous, passive fellow who does much of the same and is in the same profession. While he is at least a little more responsible than Withnail, he follows along with Withnail's schemes with a kind of submissive mania. The two decide they are reaching the pinnacle of unwell and need to take a vacation. They persuade Withnail's urbane, gay Uncle Monty to let them use his country cabin for a time. When they get to the cabin, nothing is as they expected. It is cold, raining, and muddy. They have no food, firewood, or fuel, and little booze. The locals are unfriendly. The situation slowly begins to turn around, but Monty shows up and throws another kink in their plans. What will become of their accidental vacation?

If you've never seen this film, get on it immediately. There are an appalling number of instantly quotable lines and should you meet anyone out at a bar who has seen the film, you will probably make an instant friend. It richly deserves the cult status it has achieved, as well as its Criterion release, which I recommend buying as soon as possible. The documentary, "Withnail and Us" is almost as funny as the film itself.

It's amazing that this was Grant's first feature role and probably his best performance to date. Despite the fact that he is an avowed non-drinker and I believe is allergic to alcohol, he's perfect as Withnail. McGann is also quite good as his roommate, hovering constantly between paranoid, drunk, and outraged.

This is definitely a black comedy, but if you hate British humor, it doesn't really fall within the same boundaries as most films of that category. It's more drinking-because-life-is-miserable-and-I-hate-my-job-or-am-unemployed humor than anything else.

I leave you with two of my favorite scenes: