Suffer Little Children (1983)

Based on a true story, apparently! That sounds completely plausible.

To wit:A mute little girl with a “please take care of me” note in her hand appears on the doorstep of a small orphanage in what I assume to be a city in the UK. She seems quiet and pleasant enough, but in truth, she’s possessed by SATAN (caps contractually obligated). After turning two other girls into her servants in a zombie picnic dream, she bides her time with minor bouts of terror and violence.

Mostly, we watch people do very little of interest, while most of the dialogue is completely drowned out by a repetitive score that does pop up some metal riffs whenever the action becomes properly SATANic.

Until, eventually, finally, the boredom culminates in a twenty minute freak-out of kids in an attic bowing before our satanic child queen making jazz hands, scenes of kids with knives (apparently a decades-old British nightmare, though they do miss hoodies) piling onto grown-ups and each other until blood spurts, bizarre yet excellently cheap editing effects and an appearance of the Lord Jesus himself (note to SATAN: don’t crucify pop stars), who points his (holy, one supposes) finger at possessed kids while cheap laser pew-pew noises play. It’s pretty fantastic.

Apparently, the smaller British arm of SOV horror, here exemplified in the efforts of Alan Briggs, Meg Shanks and their kid and teen acting school pupils, felt a need to demonstrate to their American colleagues in horror how to properly do that very shot on video horror thing of two interminable acts of nothing followed by one incredibly bonkers and entertaining climax. Consequently, apart from the zombie picnic and an unfortunate death or two, Suffer’s first two acts are a pain to get through, with dull people shot dully in dull locations talking for hours through dialogue you mostly can’t even hear (what you do manage to hear suggests you’re better off that way anyhow). It’s truly excruciating, even though the viewer does get to gawk at some top early 80s UK fashion.

Of course, all that dullness does turn the eventual freak-out of cheap, hilarious violence and utter mind-blowing strangeness not just highly entertaining but also somewhat shocking. Not because some of these kids are rather painfully good screamers – they are - but because at this point in proceedings, nobody could have expected these particular filmmakers to get their acts together enough to create scenes this loud, peculiar, bloody and fun.

Which only goes to show that all those Hollywood movie who taught us to never give up hope did know what they were talking about. I’ll never doubt again (lest Jesus shoot me with his finger guns).