Retro Review: Children of the Stones (1976)

Children of the Stones is a little confusing, underplaying its hand with a sort of subtlety that lends it even more of a creepy power. The story revolves around a Stonehenge-like circle of megalithic, er, megaliths in a small British town in the British countryside. That is, undeniably, one hundred percent British.

Now that we've got that out of the way, we can proceed. Adam Brake and his son Matt (Gareth Thomas and Peter Demin, respectively) go to the small town of Milbury, where everyone acts very weird, and all to investigate the stone circle, or a supernova (Adam Brake is an astrophysicist) or the death of the astrophysicist that preceded him, and meet up with a fellow named Dai, who I took to be very much like Freddy Jones in The Elephant Man (1980) until I realized that, indeed, it WAS Freddy Jones. Dai is some sort of village weirdo or day laborer but otherwise serves the function of the Ancient Mariner of every horror tale like this, casting foreboding warnings, a sense of doom, what-have-you. Matthew is carrying a strange painting of a stone circle with a beam of light issuing upward from it, and there's a bit of conversation about this but it is a little obtuse and hard to follow (much like the plot).

Matthew soon makes friends with some of the weird local children, such as his newfound girlfriend Sandra (Katherine Levy) and Adam Brake makes a special gal pal of her mother Margaret (Veronica Strong) who runs a museum with a medieval "barber-surgeon" that was crushed by one of the megalithic stones and was carrying an amulet decorated with a serpent, and is killed in much the same way that Dai will end up "dead" (but not forever I'll tell you) later. Meanwhile, Matt fights at school, and the Stepford Children faction of the local youth appears to him to be superintelligent and very peculiar. Sandra is not one of "them" at least.

There's a scene where Adam touches one of the stones in the circle and receives a sort of psychic electric shock, but that is nothing compared to his son, who begins to develop psychic intuitions and abilities so vast he should start a nightclub routine. The soundtrack is a discordant choir whooping and wailing and making all manner of hullabaloo and sounding quite like something Stockhausen might have composed in 1973 or thereabouts. Confused yet? I sure was.

The Big Chief in Charge of the village, Hendrick, (Lain Cuthbertson) is a traditional creepy guy living in a creepy old English manor house like a veritable Lord and serves the purpose of being the nexus of "evil" or menace quite nicely. He invites Margaret and Sandra over for dinner, and a huge beam of light comes from the table, and the Wicker Man refugees from Milbury all come out holding hands and chanting in the stone circle. Voila! We find that time is imprisoned here, somehow, due to sending a beam of negative energy to a supernova that formed a black hole somewhere in the vicinity of Ursa Minor and turned everyone in medieval times to stone, but that's okay because...the barber-surgeon.

Anyway, people are turned to stone because of the lay lines, the time cycles, and supernovas, and black holes, and barber-surgeons and whooping, warping soundtracks and it is all really, curiously underplayed but think of The Wicker Man (1973) but with stones instead of wood. And nobody gets burned alive (at least, not so far as I can tell).

In the end, everyone seems to make out okay, the repeating and updating but relivable time cycles are all in order again and nobody but Adam and his son remembers a damn thing. Matt wants a disgusting sandwich (he eats them), and one is reminded that English food has never been accused of being particularly digestible (well, you don't see English restaurants proliferating in the world like Chinese take-out, do you? Ah, shut up already with your damn "wokeness").

Originally played on Nickelodeon's "The Third Eye" program, which was a sort of horror, psychic, and paranormal and fantasy occult-themed children's program, but which was part of an Illuminati plot to SATANIZE the little bastards so that they'd start all spinning Judas Priest records back wards while summoning Bast, Beherit, and Lucifuge Rofocale.

Still my favorite opener of any television series I have ever seen.

Woosh! It sure worked on me. I don't know how many puppies I sacrificed. In the words of Monty Python (or rather to paraphrase them): "I've sacrificed more puppies to Belial than you've 'ad 'ot meals!" So no I have to spend eternity being sodomized by the scaly, ice-cold member of one of the infernal crew of lizard-skinned porno studs from Down Below, whose johnson is probably hammered through with Clive Barker hooks and rusty spikes and all the like. But, well, in a sense this is a relief.

I mean, at least I don't have to eat any British cuisine.

By the way, this movie or television serial or whatever is pretty good.

Children of the Stones