Twisted Nerve

Here's an interesting little movie. I would have loved to have been about when this originally hit the screens. Quite what the producers were going for is difficult to imagine and possibly they weren't too aware themselves as it ends up in a jumbled mess that would even make the Italians gasp at. It must have made some sort of sense while on the story boards, but the convolutions involved go against each other in such a way that whatever way you wish to look at it, there's always a piece of the jigsaw that doesn't fit.

Hywell Bennett plays Martin, a (possible) mummy's boy who becomes infatuated with Susan (Hayley Mills) and engineers himself into moving into her mother's boarding house, but under the guise of Georgie, a backward man with a child's mind. While living there, he endears himself to the both and the occupants but also uses the subterfuge that he has set up to kill his step-father. His dangerous side is found out just before he can kill Susan, but not before he has already offed her mother. An explantion is offered that because he has a Down's Syndrome brother makes him more susceptable to killing.

That's kind of what happens but there's oh so much more that the writer/director/producer want to shove in there to make you second guess what it's all about. And it woks. You're left with so many questions about what went on that none of it makes any sense when you play each fact off each other. My opinion is that at the end the big twist is supposed to be that he WAS mad and it wasn't all a big plan, but that part is so badly drawn it's nearly laughable. What stops it being laughable is the casual offence it thrusts in front of the viewer many times without any other reason than to be offensive. The casual racism offered to the Asian occupant of the boarding house has absolutely no bearing on the proceedings. It makes no point. Whatsoever. It's just there. The whole Down's Syndrome reason for the murders (or Mongolid as it's put, but I suppose you can put that down to the era) is soooooo unnecessary to the plot of the film unless that is what the makers actually thought, which is distasteful in the extreme, regardless of the age. It smacks you like a shovel that the makers were trying to 'controversial' for its own sake. A kind of "This'll get us noticed now that our (The Boulting Brothers) star is on the wane. And it did. It disappeared for years and has only resurfaced properly in the last few years, more likely than not because of Q Tarantino's use of the theme in his overtly stylish Kill Bill films.

But, bizarrely, it kind of works. Almost. The acting on offer is beyond approach. Hywell Bennett plays the troubled young man very well. Billie Whitelaw is her usual excellence as Ms Mills' mother. Even Ms Mills herself, who at this point was trying to make the breakthrough into adult films, plays her part well; the more bizarre points of the story are easily bridged although you are left with the kind of raised frown that is usually reserved for continental exploitation movies. Maybe that's why it jars, British thrillers are rarely exploitative for exploitative's own sake.
An interesting aside is that it is written by Leo Marks, who also penned Peeping Tom - a film which does have so many parallels with this one - a film about a psychopathic killer, hiding out in a boarding house, deep father issues etc. On top of that both films were despised in their time and took a seeming eternity to re-emerge. There is a difference in that Peeping Tom is an exceptional piece of film-making art and Twisted Nerve isn't, but you can't help think about what could have been.