I Watch Films: These Are The Damned

 

These Are The Damned

Simon, an American tourist on the south coast of England, is lured into a mugging by Joan, a pretty young woman. The motorcycle gang who rob him, all in leather jackets, are led by King (Oliver Reed) who wears a tweed jacket and carries an umbrella and is Joan’s brother. Joan then decides to join Simon on his yacht.

Down the coast they spend the night in a house occasionally occupied by an artist (a side character in town). They’ve been followed onshore by some of King’s gang who surround the house but they escape only for King, Simon and Joan to stray onto a secret base next door, where they find their way into an underground base where children are being brought up away from the world (The man in charge of the base is another side character who lets the artist stay in the house). As the secrets of the base are uncovered everyone has to decide how they will react.

It's an odd film that spends a lot of time setting up an interesting conflict on the South Coast and then takes a left turn into a strange paranoid science fiction plot. King’s obsession with things being clean and pure dovetails with what’s going on in the caves, as do the crude primitive sculptures of the artist. So it’s deliberately unsettling in that way.

Watch This: Some fun sixties seaside crime and a pessimistic atomic age tragedy
Don’t Watch This: A gang film, a mystery film, a horror film, all jammed awkwardly together