These Are the Damned

I couldn't believe it - this is shot in my home town. I wasn't really paying attention to the film, what with my heady daze and astonished grin, as I watched fictional characters play out a quasi Clockwork Orange drama on the streets I walk daily. Except, this is 48 years ago, when there are a tenth as many cars and they're all curvaceous and pretty. The film itself is a bit rubbish - "charming," I expect, to some, but Elisabeth Frink's sculptures are beautiful, as is a young Shirley Anne Field.

Black leather, black leather. Crash, crash, crash. That'll be stuck in there for awhile. I read that Oliver Reed was an influence on A Clockwork Orange in Robert Sellers' Hellraisers and I needed to know. What I found out was that somebody thought Kiss Me Deadly didn't go sci-fi enough and decided to amp it up to eleven. Falls way closer to the non-monster (my favorite) Hammer films like Paranoic and Scream of Fear, but it's not up to par with those. Maybe because it's really two movi

A hidden gem. Some may find the melding of different genres and the many fears of the time it was made in, of Teddy Boys, lead by a youthful and compelling Oliver Reed, rampaging around a British seaside, and of a global issue presented through science fiction metaphors, erratic, but it worked perfectly for me. Add to this an incredibly sobering ending and this turned out to be an immense surprise, a blind buy on DVD which stands out in the Hammer Studio catalogue.

The first half hour and the final hour are like two different films, and the transition between them is rather clumsy, but they're both really good. The first a contemporary 60s drama about generational shifts, the second a wider scope picture about 60s war paranoia.

Starts off badly, with one of the most godawful obnoxious songs you'll ever hear ("Black Leather Rock"). It's sort of like they grafted a JD flick onto a scifi film, and none of it quite gels. The scifi part is intriguing, but it isn't developed enough; still, the final "Help me!" fadeout is undeniably rather haunting.