Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Nigel P Belle Adams (Hayley Mills) catches a lift with a local driver, amidst rumours of a maniac on the loose. Seems like someone has broken out of the nearby Greenwood Sanatorium. Interesting that the local reports don't specify whether the escapee is male or female. Anyway, the driver quite candidly feels he has the right to attempt to rape her as a form of 'settling the fare'. When she is rescued by a tipsy Simon Ward (as Steven Slade), he tells her 'she asked for it.' It is strange to see former child star Hayley Mills as a focus for lust among the men (she is, after all, 29 at this time). And smoking ciggies as well! Her wholesome image endures however and Adams is either very naïve or very brave to be travelling alone during such times on what appears to be a whim. Several flashbacks throw suspicion on both her and Slade, and it is good to see dependable Peter Jeffrey playing another rogue.They stop at a petrol station, where the young female attendant flirts with Slade. He has an eye for the ladies and his behaviour is a little odd. Not too surprising to find that she is murdered shortly after. Slade and Adams have temporarily split up during this time, leaving them both suspects. Unruffled, they reunite after Slade has apparently 'made a phone call', and continue their journey.From then on, it is one mishap after another. Belle meets up with the eccentric Malcolm Robarts (Sterling Hayden), who is clearly not going to let a thirty year age-gap stop him trying to woo Belle.The British locations are wonderful, all winter trees, barren roads, dilapidated petrol stations and, latterly, a windswept seaside town. Directed rather like a television movie by the prolific Sidney Hayes (who went on to have great success directing American series including 'Baywatch', 'Knight Rider' and 'Magnum PI', and his previous brush with horror was 1960's 'Circus of Horrors'), who wrings as much intrigue and tension out of the low budget. Interestingly when, during the finale, one character kills another character (you'll get no names out of me) there is no music, just the sound of taut rope being stretched around the throat of the victim.This is a terrific, sparse road-tale of psychological horror with a tiny cast of excellent actors, set in a bleak world where most people you meet are either sex-maniacs or hooligans. I always felt that Simon Ward never really had quite the success he deserved. The wonderful Mills moved away from acting for a few years after 'Deadly Strangers' before returning to television in 1981 for the highly-regarded 'Flame Trees of Thika', which lead to a renewed interest in the profession.

Robert J. Maxwell I don't think any normal person would claim this film's opening scenes are pregnant with possibility. There are all the symptoms of a cheap horror flick -- the lurid colors, the tinny electronic score, the conceit of the killer's point of view, the murders -- three of them -- before the opening credits roll and one murder immediately after. The first killing has a pretty British nurse killed in a hospital after being injected with some kind of potion, gasping, legs kicking, underpants showing. Night time. Few lights, mostly red or a bleached, ghoulish green, and blinding white. Ominous. All portending a ride through the Haunted House at Disneyland.We never get to see the psychotic killer during his or her escape from the booby hatch. So who could it be? There are myriad red herrings. Simon Ward, "Young Winston," looks awfully suspicious when we first see him at a roadside stop, playing a slot machine and staring at himself in the mirror. Would any sane person look at himself in a mirror? I know I wouldn't. Then there's Hayley Mills -- oh, so innocent; maybe TOO innocent, with her plump lower lip and those shapely knees. The director, by the way, seems to have a thing for knees. Well, in Hayley Mills' case, he can't be blamed. And, after all, Luis Bunuel was into shoes and Walt Disney spent a lot of time around animals.Then there is Sterling Hayden who brings a bit of color to a familiar story of hitch hikers and maniacs. He's dressed like Captain Ahab and has a bushy gray beard of a retired Civil War general. He puts more energy into his brief role as an old blowhard than he has in any other performance, outside of "Dr. Strangelove," where the effort was masked by his real acting skills.Among the felicities, Mills' knees aside, there are those cute British phone booths. I don't know why America can't make its phone booths out of wood and paint them a bright crimson. They look sturdy, and comfortable enough to spend hours in. Among the weaknesses, well, an example. At a gas station, Ward happens upon a window through which he sees a young woman undressing and getting into what appears to be a uniform shirt. While the camera gapes at her figure, there are interpolated cuts, three or four of them, to the gigantic close up of Ward's single blue eye. The effect is almost surreal but that isn't what the director and editor intended. They just did it because one of them, seized by a brain storm, said something like, "Shouldn't we have a big close up of the actor's eye, so that we know he's still peeping?" Imagine Hitchcock cutting back and forth from Janet Leigh's undressing to a bulging close up of Anthony Perkins' eyeball.There are flashbacks heralded by slow camera movement into a close up, followed by a dissolve, harp music, the flashback with its edges blurred. Both actors suffer from them. Mill's are about her happy youth, riding a horse along the beach, until we reach the part where she was sexually abused as a child. (Zzzz.) Ward's are about impotence. The logic of the tale is flawed; Ward and Mills quarrel when they first meet, but before you know it, and without adumbration, Mills is actively protecting him -- because he might have accidentally killed an aggressive motorcyclist.The ending emerges from the shadows and the identity of the murdering lunatic is revealed. If it's a surprise, it's only because some earlier incidents have made this ending impossible.

lazarillo A young woman (Hayley Mills) misses her train and is forced to hitchhike. After a misadventure with a horny truck driver who wants her to pay a "fare", she is picked up by a handsome but mysterious stranger (Simon Ward) who may just have escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane. This is a familiar role for Hayley Mills that she had basically performed several times before: the pretty dolly bird who meets a slimy creep that she is nevertheless somewhat sexually attracted to (except that her usual co-star Hywel Bennet is replaced here by Simon Ward). When she played this role back in "Twisted Nerve", however, she was still coming off her wholesome Disney image, and was appealing, but also pretty two-dimensional. In "Endless Night" she played a troubled heiress and had little more of a rounded character and performance. In this movie the back-story of her character, revealed in flashbacks where she is orphaned in a car accident and sent to live with a lecherous uncle, might make her even more troubled than the sinister young man who picks her up. (There is in fact a great twist at the end here that I don't want to reveal).Ironically, Mills first played this "endangered innocent" role as a child actress way back even before Disney in 1959's "Tiger Bay" (where she plays a pre-pubescent girl who steals a gun and befriends a murderer). It took her this long, in what was basically to be her last film, to get back to the acting and fully developed roles in which she first started. It was revealed years later that Mills had been offered, and nearly accepted, the title role in Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita". And while that notorious role ruined the career (and perhaps life) of the actress who eventually took it (Sue Lyon), it might have actually been better for Mills than all the saccharine, cloying Disney movies she got typecast in.This is pretty much Mills show all the way. Ward is good but pretty functional. It's generally well directed by journeyman director Sid Hayers ("Assault", "Circus of Horror", "Revenge"). Sterling Hayden shows up in a cameo as an eccentric old coot (and his character's harmless flirtations with Mills have some unintentional sexual tension given that in real life she had recently married a man about Hayden's age). And, oh yes, and for those of you whose minds are in the gutter (along with mine), Mills also has some nice nude scenes. Good luck finding this as it is undeservedly very obscure today, but it's definitely recommended.

GUENOT PHILIPPE There is something in this picture I really don't understand. I missed it or I'm dumb....Where the couple - Mills and Ward - are at the gas station, after the tank of their car is filled up and the girl employee has returned in her cottage, the couple gets back into the car, and then Ward says to Mills "I'll be back" - something like that. Mills stays in the car and Ward gets out.OK ?In the scene after, the girl of the gas station is molested. We of course don't see who did that. We suppose it's Ward. The same returns to the car several seconds later while Mills seems to be asleep...Beware SPOILERS Beware SPOILERS Beware SPOILERS Beware SPOILERS !!So, when we discover, at the end, that Mills is the murderer on the loose from the lunatic asylum, we wonder how the hell could have she killed - or even rape!!! - the girl at the gas station while Ward was also in the corner. And what did he himself do in the same time?Or was he the real assassin of the employee ?I suppose so...In conclusion, Mills and Ward were a couple of killers without knowing about each other !!!