Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

James Hitchcock Hammer Films were noted for their horror and science fiction productions, but this is one of their more curious offerings, made in black-and-white rather than Hammer's more usual colour. The action takes place in the South Coast seaside town of Weymouth and the neighbouring promontory of Portland Bill. There are two strands to the plot. The first deals with the curious relationship between Simon Wells, a middle- aged American tourist, and Joan, a beautiful 20-year-old local girl. The first time they meet she lures him into a brutal mugging at the hands of her brother, King, and his gang of hooligans. (With their motorbikes and black leather jackets the gang appear to be part of the Rocker subculture; during the sixties the Rockers and their Mod rivals often used to congregate in seaside resorts, especially in Southern England).Despite this unfortunate start to their relationship, romance later blossoms between Simon and Joan, largely because she sees him as a way of escaping from her jealous, possessive brother who will not allow any man to show any interest in her. The script, in fact, implies a possible incestuous attraction towards Joan on King's part, but in the early sixties this could never be made too explicit.The second strand to the plot concerns the military base on Portland Bill and the sinister experiments being carried on there. The film was based on a novel entitled "The Children of Light", but the film itself was given the title "The Damned" (alternately "These Are the Damned"), possibly in order to suggest a link with John Wyndham's novel "Village of the Damned" and the film made of it in 1960. No such link actually exists- "The Children of Light" was written by one H.L. Lawrence, not by Wyndham- but both feature a mysterious, otherworldly group of children who appear different from normal humans.The children here are being held prisoner in an underground bunker beneath the military base, isolated from the outside world and from all contact with outsiders. They are being educated by a scientist named Bernard, but he only contacts them via closed circuit television, never in person. We learn that the children's peculiarities are due to their pregnant mothers having been exposed to radiation in a "nuclear accident", although it is never explained how this happened. (The children are all aged 11 and, as the film was made in 1961, but not released until 1963, this implies that they must have been conceived around 1949/50, a time when Britain had neither nuclear weapons nor civilian nuclear power). The two strands become linked when Simon and Joan are forced to enter the base in order to escape pursuit by King and his gang. When, however, they stumble upon the children they find that their lives are in danger.The film's main weakness is the difficulty in uniting its two different plot strands into a coherent whole. It starts off as a sociological examination of British youth culture in the early sixties, something akin to "Beat Girl" which also starred Shirley Anne Field and Oliver Reed, and ends up as a science-fiction thriller about clandestine government activities in the nuclear age. The idea was presumably to imply some sort of parallel between the violence perpetrated by King and his gang and the violence perpetrated by the state, but this is never really convincing. The relationship between Simon and Joan never really rings true either; it might have been better if they had been closer in age.Indeed, it might have been better if the film had concentrated more on the imprisoned children and less on the Simon/Joan/King storyline, as it is this part of the story which contains the most original elements. The film was made a year before, and released a year after, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and its themes fit in well with the nuclear anxieties of the sixties. The force which drives Bernard's every action is his conviction that a nuclear holocaust is imminent, and in 1961 there would have been many who shared his fears, even if few would have shared his ideas about how civilisation could be rebuilt after such an Armageddon. The director Joseph Losey was an American Communist who had fled to Britain after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and he may have been attracted to this story as an example of the sort of film he might not have been allowed to make had he remained in America. Losey's sharp black-and-white photography brings a grimly compelling quality to the film, especially to the scenes dealing with the doomed children. Overall, however, "These Are the Damned" never really succeeds in joining together its two incompatible story lines and wastes too much time on the first, resulting in a broken-backed feel to it. To paraphrase Eric Morecambe, "You can see the join!" 6/10

Spikeopath The Damned (AKA: These Are The Damned) is directed by Joseph Losey and adapted to screenplay by Evan Jones from the novel The Children of Light written by H.L. Lawrence. It stars Macdonald Carey, Shirley Anne Field, Oliver Reed, Alexander Knox, Viveca Lindfors and Walter Gotell. Music is by James Bernard and cinematography by Arthur Grant.The South Coast of England, and a middle aged American tourist, a Teddy Boy gang leader and his troubled sister are thrust together into a deadly scenario deep below the cliffs of Weymouth...Blacklisted by Hollywood, Joseph Losey moved to Britain to continue his artistic leanings. 1963 saw the release of two Losey movies, the much lauded The Servant and also The Damned, the latter of which was finished in 1961 but held back for reasons that are not exactly clear. As it transpires, The Damned is something of an under seen gem, a unique picture that defies genre classification, one of Hammer Films' oddest productions but all the more brilliant for it.From the off it should be stated that this is not a film for those wishing to be cheered up, from a brutal mugging at the start to a finale that will haunt your dreams, pessimism and bleakness pervades the narrative. This is in the vein of The Quatermass series of films, tinged with a touch of John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos, yet for the fist part of the film there's no clue as to where the narrative will take you. The back drop is a sunny and vibrant seaside town (Weymouth one of my favourite British resorts), an irritatingly catchy tune (Black Leather Rock) is being sung as we follow the meeting of the principal characters. From here you think this is a film about teenage angst, a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club themed picture, where the perils of gang youth is born and the divide between the young and the old is caustically dissected. Yet this is not the case at all, this is merely a cataclysmic meeting of integrity and troubled souls that's going somewhere terribly sad, the vagaries of fate dealing its deadly hand.Losey then instills the picture with potent characterisations and striking imagery as we head towards what will be a fascinating and clinically cruel last third of the film. The brother and sister relationship between King and Joan is drip fed with smart dialogue, we don't need it spelled out, but we know that from King's side of things it's badly unhealthy. In the middle is Simon, trying to build a relationship with Joan under trying circumstances. At first it's hard to accept a "clearly too old" Simon as a romantic partner for a sultry Joan, but as back stories are dangled it's not inconceivable that Joan would seek solace in the arms of an older man.The Children of Light.On the outer edges, for a while, are Bernard (Knox) and Freya (Lindfors), he's a scientist, she's a sculptress, they themselves are part of a weird relationship. He's mysterious and soon to become the focal point of a terrible secret, she's eccentric and spends her time at her cliff top studio crafting weird sculptures, the latter of which Losey gleefully enjoys framing to keep the atmosphere edgy, the images are lasting and used to great impact as The Damned reveals its hand, and what a hand it is. Enter the science fiction, enter the government and their shifty dalliances, enter the children, the children of light...It's a socko final third of cinema, both narratively and in viewing Losey's skill at creating striking compositions (while he garners impressive performances from his cast as well, especially Lindfors). It becomes thrilling yet deeply profound as it spins towards its bleak finale. It can be argued that its core sentiment (message) is heavily handled, and that Carey is a touch unsuitable as an all action hero type, but the film rises above these minor issues. For once the camera pulls away from the cliffs to reveal a swanky seaside town, the cries of children still ringing in our ears, you know you have watched something pretty special. 9/10One of Hammer's unsung classics, The Damned can be found on The Icons of Suspense Hammer Collection. Region 1, it appears with five other films, two of which - Cash On Demand/Never Take Sweets from A Stranger - are also little gems waiting to be discovered. Great transfers for viewing pleasure, I can't recommend this collection highly enough.

MartinHafer "These Are The Damned" is a very difficult film to watch. In some ways, it is fascinating...but the fascination is often lost because the plot is so unnecessarily complicated and confused. It's a shame, because if the film had cut out most of the first 30 minutes, it would have been a lot better.The film begins with a plot that has NOTHING to do with the later portion of the movie. The American actor, Macdonald Carey, owns a boat and lands in London. There, he's beaten up by a gang led by the freaky Oliver Reed. I say freaky because there's a kinky undercurrent of incest between himself and his lovely sister--and yet this, like the Carey portion of the story, is never capitalized upon and the film is confused in its focus. Eventually, the sister and Carey run off and are pursued by Reed and his gang. But then, the film does a complete turnabout--as the pair are rescued by a group of radioactive mutant children living in a weird British government lab!!! Believe it or not, it's like two completely different films are just tossed together--and both major stories get short-changed in the process. I wanted to see more about Reed's kinky relationship or the new relationship between the sister and Carey--but what about the paranoid radioactive mutant story?!?! The bottom line is that the film has a lot of interesting portions but the whole is a mess. In addition, a few little things in the film are sloppy--such as the SUPER-annoying "Black Leather" song and the angle outside window at 25 minutes that is completely impossible and poorly integrated. An interesting failure.

rpvanderlinden There's something very unsettling about the opening scenes of "The Damned", a superb sci-fi parable from director Joseph Losey. A gang of Teddy Boys, chanting, "black leather, black leather, smash, smash, smash!" march like fascist thugs through the streets of a quaint, gingerbread seaside town. Using a pretty girl (Shirley Anne Field) as bait they ambush an American tourist (Macdonald Carey), and rob and beat him. The leader of the gang, a vicious punk played by Oliver Reed, pursues the American and the girl when it becomes clear that they're interested in each other. Meanwhile, a woman (Viveca Lindfors) who creates hulking, death-like sculptures of animals, is having an intimate relationship with the scientist (Alexander Knox) who runs a secret program at a nearby military base. Later we will discover that he's breeding a group of radioactive children - children who have hearts and minds, but who are, for all intents and purposes, the living dead. All of these disparate elements are at water's edge of the English Channel that stretches out, like a dreamscape, to a limitless horizon, drenched by intense white sunshine. I can't imagine a more appropriate location for an apocalyptic thriller or a better choice than the black-and-white widescreen cinematography to present it.It takes awhile for these symbolic and dramatic threads to coalesce, but I didn't mind - I was hooked. I experienced feelings of dread and foreboding that didn't diminish even after the final fade-out. This is an unusual Hammer film. It doesn't play out like a B-movie, feeling instead like a pre-holocaust "On the Beach". The scientist acts as a kindly uncle to the children, but he's really a very dangerous man. If you buy into his vision of an eventual nuclear apocalypse (it's going to happen anyway, so why try to stop it?), you might think he's merely a pragmatist. But as the events in the second half of the film demonstrate, he IS the apocalypse. Scary, edgy and disturbing, "The Damned" presents a take on nihilism no less relevant almost fifty years after its release during the Cold War. Today, the apocalypse is still upon us. Anarchy, terrorism, global warming - take your pick.