'CHILD'S PLAY'......NO, NOT CHUCKY....EVEN SCARIER - SCHOOLBOY MINIONS!

Child's Play (1972)    Critics and audiences didn't know what to make of this oddball item, based on hit Broadway play........

                   A dark drama?   A satanic horror film?  A creepy swipe at Catholicism?

                   Feel free to pick one, since the movie, a high toned studio release from the master of New York based melodrama Sidney Lumet, remains, remote, ambiguous and mysteriously coy to the very end.........

                    But watching again, 47 years later, we found something in it that resonates more than ever today......

                    Beau Bridges plays Paul Reis,  a young gym instructor returning to teach at his alma mater, a Catholic boys' high school. And what a dark mess he steps into........the boys have been randomly (it seems) targeting some classmates for brutal assaults and torture......

                   Amidst these escalating bloody incidents, a civil war rages between two of the school's lay teachers, the popular, much beloved Joe Dobbs (Robert Preston) and the strict, unforgiving, thoroughly despised Latin teacher Malley (James Mason)

                  The priests in charge are at a loss at to what's turning the boys into a skulking wolf pack but the movie drops clues along the way.......leading to the least surprising twist that you could practically guess from the first scene......

                   What's fun to watch here: the stark contrast in acting styles........Preston, playing to the upper balcony, as as boisterous and bombastic as his Prof. Harold Hill character from "The Music Man".....you expect him to start singing at any moment.  Mason delivers a less showy, but intense portrait of a wounded, heartsick soul, dealing with a terminally ill mother and a campaign of ugly harassment from persons unknown...........(or is he just paranoid?)

                   Here's what grabbed us.......the schoolboys, as we'd already guessed, have been weaponized as mindless, soulless minions, slaves to a cult of personality.  In that regard, they reminded us at once of the red hats at Trump rallies......blind to all reason.

                  It's clear that Sidney Lumet wanted to have it every which way.......a mish-mash of mystery, horror and drama that never once figures out what it's supposed to be.  So he ended up with  a who-knows-what-it-is that nobody liked or understood.   (The composer, Michael Small, obviously voted for horror, scoring the film with ominous church chants)

                But we didn't mind taking another look, after all these years......and enjoyed the performances and the unsettling ambiance.....(and the weird similarity to that's going on today in current events....) 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)