Cinema of the Weird: Suffer, Little Children (1983)

This no budget film was produced at The Meg Shanks Drama School. It may have been used to promote the talents of the pupils. Rather bizarley it was made by children (or at least teenagers) and they chose to make a fairly violent horror film. They acknowledge its influences of Carrie and Halloween in the end credits.

A mute girl (Elizabeth played by Nicola Diana) is a new member at Sullivans Children's Home. The kids suspect she has "something weird" going on. One boy is pushed down a set of stairs or was it an accident? Plenty of other weird children's deaths, the nastiest being one girl who repeatedly stabs herself in the leg. There's also a weird zombie dream or possibly a hallucination which Elizabeth made them see. A "rock" band also visits the children's home and they later play a charity gig at a local night club. They look more like Bros., Wham or another camp 80s boyband than a bad boy rock band. They make George Michael look like Nikki Sixx.

The acting is OK, and they seemed to be going for a naturalistic approach which was rare at the time. The film is badly edited, directed and the special effects are shit. This adds to the charm and I could live with this, but the film commits the mortal sin no horror film should commit: it's abysmally boring. It's like my worst dates; too much talk, not enough action.

The film was seized by DPP after it was picked-up by a distributor. I don't know if it was the film's title or because of the video nasty moral panic going on at the time, but they seemed to think it was a child abuse film. Way off the mark, it's a third-rate devil-child film. More astonishingly, it actually got picked-up by a distributor (Films Galore) and the cost of legal proceedings drove them to bankruptcy. The film has a very small cult following in the US and UK, mainly for its bad film status. It's available to watch on Youtube and other streaming sites. There's also a great review in the Flesh and Blood Compendium.

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