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Zap and you're pregnant, as Kenneth Anger would have it, so it goes with a cozy British burg on the edge of the new decade. The populace of Midwich is knocked out for a few hours in the middle of the day, an unnerving collage of dangling phones, running faucets and burning ironing boards illustrates the "static, odorless, invisible" phenomenon. Time passes and the womenfolk all turn up expectant, which brings joy to the local egghead (George Sanders), friction to the village husbands, and dismay to the virgins. "A perfect specimen" born en masse, the infant with "arresting" eyes in its cradle contemplated in a shot reproduced verbatim in Rosemary's Baby. Kierkegaard once compared the dread of childbirth to that of death itself ("...the spirit trembles"), Losey in These Are the Damned would envision a young glacial brood ultimately reduced to lost voices. In between, "the world's new people": Saturnine little brain-scanners, platinum-haired and glowing-eyed, precocious genius mixed with juvenile cruelty. The toddler telepathically wills mum (Barbara Shelley) to scald herself for giving him hot milk, later the prepubescent boy (Martin Stephens) incinerates a torch-carrying mob without breaking a sweat. Foreign infiltrators? Bastard aliens? LeRoy's The Bad Seed, a whole colony of them, "one mind to the twelfth power" and ready to take over. Wolf Rilla keeps a cool grip over the heady material, outlining vivid horrors—unwanted insemination, the cuckold's confusion, rejection from one's own offspring. Faced with uncontrollable creations, the scientific mind molds itself into a brick wall, which crumbles to reveal the ticking bomb behind it. The fable's Germanic side is not lost on Haneke (The White Ribbon). With Michael Gwynn, Laurence Naismith, John Phillips, Richard Vernon and Thomas Heathcote. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |