There’s nothing in Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behaviour (shot under the title Dead Kids) that we haven’t seen in various guises a gazillion times before but it’s done very well and with its tongue firmly in cheek. It’s not a spoof – it’s played completely straight – but it has enough humourous flourishes and directorial oddities to lift it above the run-of-the-mill. It was the directorial debut of Laughlin, the American producer of films like The Whisperers (1967), Joanna (1968) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) among others.
Something strange is going on in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois. Teenagers are suddenly turning into brutal killers and there’s something odd going on at the Galesburg University’s psychiatric department where Gwen Parkinson (Fiona Lewis) is carrying on experiments first conducted by her late mentor Professor Le Sange (Arthur Dignam). Pete (Dan Shor), son of the town’s chief of police John Brady (Michael Murphy) signs up for one of Parkinson’s trials and is plied with experimental mind control drugs developed by Le Sange. As the bodies mount up, Le Sange is revealed to still be alive, plotting his revenge against Brady whose investigations into his experiments had his work shut down years before.
Strange Behaviour, which begins as a standard issue slasher before developing into something more interesting, earns a place in the history books as the first horror film made in New Zealand (there was also Australian and American money involved) and was followed a few years later by David Blyth’s Death Warmed Up (1984) which has a remarkably similar plot. Laughlin’s film is dislocated spatially and temporally – it’s set in the US but was filmed in and around Auckland and the aesthetic often suggests that the story is taking place in the 1950s though that’s clearly not the case. It lends the film an off-kilter weirdness that helps you past some of the script’s flabbier moments.
There’s something very strange about Galesburg even before we get to Parkinson and Le Sange’s revenge plot. Students watch a film lecture that Le Sange left behind which he uses to hypnotises a chicken, for example, and the town’s kids attend a party where they spontaneously burst into a synchronised dance routine to Lou Christie’s 1966 hit Lightning Strikes while dressed as characters from 1960s television series (Batman and Robin, the flying nun, Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie, the Munsters, the Flintstones et al). Galesburg is clearly a very odd place to live even before the mind controlled teens start mutilating townsfolk in the shower or stabbing them death while wearing Halloween fright masks.
Strange Behaviour boasts an interesting cast. The youngsters are rather anodyne though Shor went on to bag a role in Disney’s Tron (1982), Laughlin’s follow-up film Strange Invaders (1983) and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989); Dey Young, as Pete’s love interest, was in Spaceballs (1987), The Running Man (1987), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and Spontaneous Combustion (1990); and there’s a certain frisson to seeing Marc McClure, the big screen Jimmy Olsen in the Christopher Reeve Superman films, as one of the murderous teens. The grown ups include Louise Fletcher in a rather wasted role, Michael Murphy, the hero of Bob Kelljan’s Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) as the cop and co-writer Bill Condon, later the director of Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), Gods and Monsters (1998) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012), in a supporting role. Fiona Lewis seems to be having a great time as the icy Parkinson, injecting test subjects in the eye with a huge syringe, while Australian actor Arthur Dignam cuts the ham thicker than it really needs to be as the insane Le Sange.
The film was shot by Louis Horvath, formerly Al Adamson’s cinematographer, and does a surprisingly decent job here, a far cry from the rather scrappy look of the Adamson films. Strange Behaviour sounds good too thanks to a typically striking score from Tangerine Dream who augment their usual electronic sound with some delicate acoustic guitar motifs. Though never officially released, extracts from the score can be found on the semi-official bootleg Tangerine Tree 50: Assorted Secrets 2.
Though the pacing is uneven and the plot a tad sluggish at times, Strange Behaviour is still a lot of fun, an affectionate tip of the hat to the 50s science fiction films without ever becoming a simple parody. The plot is largely old hat but Laughlin and Condon mix in enough oddness to keep us engaged and it was just gory enough to attract unwanted attention from the British authorities during the “video nasties” farrago of the 1980s – it was never banned officially but copies were seized by the police in various cities.
Strange Behaviour was supposed to be the first in a trilogy of “Strange” films but the box office failure of the second installment, Strange Invaders (in which another Illinois town, Centreville, is invaded by aliens) put paid to that. Condon went on to his successful directing career and Laughlin returned to New Zealand, with Jodie Foster, John Lithgow and Michael Murphy in tow, for the period crime drama Mesmerized in 1986. He didn’t direct again.
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