DEAD KIDS

(vt Strange Behavior)

   Film (1981). Endeavour/Bannon Glenn/Hemdale. Dir Michael Laughlin, starring Michael Murphy, Louise Fletcher, Dan Shor, Fiona Lewis, Arthur Dignam. Screenplay Laughlin, William Condon. 99 mins, cut to 93 mins. Colour.

   This Australian/New Zealand exploitation sf/ HORROR movie is set in the US Midwest and has a largely US cast, but was actually shot in New Zealand. It is the first of a projected trilogy (linked by theme only) of which the second is STRANGE INVADERS (1983). At a research centre teenage kids are acting as guinea pigs in experiments in behavioural conditioning (the film is consciously anti-B.F. SKINNER) via a drug injected into the brain - on one occasion, through the eyeball. Some of them become homicidal and murder the children of a now-dead mad SCIENTIST's old enemies. The mad scientist is revealed to be not dead after all. The film - part of the teenage SPLATTER-MOVIE subgenre of the time - has plenty of gore but also wit and intelligence, as well as a rather 1950s style that would be featured again in Strange Invaders.

   PN