Director: Wolf Rilla
Production Company: MGM
Country: UK
Year: 1960
The classic adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos that made golden-haired kids with glowing eyes scary for all the obvious reasons. When everyone in the small English town of Midwich falls asleep and nobody is able to enter or leave, every woman in the town finds themselves impossibly pregnant. The kids are eventually born, grow with impossible speed, possess a hive mind, and use strange powers to bring harm to any that would wish to do ill to them.
An under 90 min runtime means the film has to cram everything in as quickly as it can, and it does it fairly well. The original novel was fairly slim, so it’s not as if there’s too much cut out, but admittedly another 10 minutes might not have gone amiss (though reportedly this was made on a shoestring budget with a six week shoot, so not all that much time). Some great performances really do the film justice, including a stellar show by Martin Stevens (who would go on to play Miles in The Innocents the following year) as David, the leader of the cuckoo children. Despite George Sanders also being in this film, and Barbara Shelley also doing a good job, Stevens’ creepy, commanding child is the real highlight.
It’s eerie and has that creepy atmosphere the book captured so well, and the finale between David and Professor Zellaby is so iconic now that it’s hard to think of this film without thinking of anything else. The cross-cutting between Zellaby trying to imagine a brick wall to block all thoughts from his mind, to the clock slowly ticking down to 8:30, all the tension heightened by the terrifying glowing eyes bringing down that mental wall… it’s all ridiculously well done.
Ok, so some of the effects aren’t too great, and the film could have done with an extra few thousand dollars thrown in, but it holds up well and is a nice, tight little scifi-horror thriller. The themes of otherness and tribalism are well explored, it’s well acted, and all round its a good little film even 62 years later. Go have some fun and thank me later.
Rating: 7/10
Review by Kieran Judge
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