[Row Three programming if we owned a Rep Cinema]

Mesmerizingly Weird Kid Films

The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T – 5:15pm
The Night of the Hunter – 7:00pm
The Naked Kiss – 9:00pm

Notice I didn’t actually say “kid’s films,” because only one of these is even remotely aimed at an audience of children. Rather, these are films that prominently feature children and are also downright strange, in wonderful stylized ways. They each also happen to have at least one deliciously unusual and somewhat creepy musical sequence, which I’d forgotten about until I was going after screencaps.

We’ll start off the night with an early showing of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, the only film written by Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. In this 1953 cult favorite, Bart is tormented by having to take piano lessons from the dictatorial Dr. Terwilliker, an activity he hates above everything else. Falling asleep at the piano one day, he imagines himself in Dr. T’s evil institute where he and 499 other boys have been enslaved to play the world’s largest piano. He’s got to navigate this surreal world, dodge Dr. T’s minions, and save his mother from Dr. T’s hypnotic influence. Oh, right, and there’s the single most bizarre musical sequence I’ve seen in pretty much any movie, with the inhabitants of Dr. T’s dungeons (basically anyone who plays any instrument other than a piano) putting on a hedonistic display of human/double-bass combos, harps that sprout out of the floor, and more. There’s plenty of cheese on hand, but some beautiful Seussian art direction and childlike charm make this the Dali-esque film you’ll be willing to let your young kids see. But you might want to send them home before the rest of the bill, because it gets a little more disturbing from here on out.

There’s really no way to adequately categorize Charles Laughton’s single directorial effort The Night of the Hunter. It’s a bit drama, a bit film noir, a bit horror, a bit suspense, a bit morality play, a bit surreal, a bit heartwarming, and a bit disturbing. Robert Mitchum is perhaps the most two-faced religious man in all of cinema, bearing “love” and “hate” on his knuckles, speaking righteousness and dealing murder and probably pedophilia. However ungainly much of the script, pacing, and acting is, and a lot of it is fairly awkward, it doesn’t much matter because Mitchum’s powerhouse performance combined with surreal and expressionistic cinematography turns this into an experience like none other. It somehow manages to take the things that shouldn’t work at all into its own brand of idiosyncratic perfection. Oh, but the kids. Right. For a lot of people, the kids who are terrorized by Mitchum are the weak link, acting blankly or badly throughout the film, but for me, that’s one of those things that shouldn’t work but does. They become ciphers for Mitchum and the strange stylistics of the film to draw on, the well at the center of the film that lets us bring our own fears and paranoia in.

But let’s not stop with such a well-known oddity as The Night of the Hunter. Let’s move back into more cultic territory while increasing the disturbing edge. Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss signals its unconventionality right from opening credit sequence, which features a young woman beating the crap out of the camera, a stand-in, as we soon learn, for one of her male clients. She’s a prostitute, but she’s had enough of being misused and heads to a new town to start a new life as a teacher at a school for crippled children. Sounds hopeful, right? Wrong. More murder, more pedophilia, and more creepy scenes of kids singing creepy songs are in store. This is a really weird film that goes places you don’t really expect and yet remains utterly spellbinding pretty much the whole time.

Expect to be vaguely creeped out, slightly disturbed, and utterly entranced by this triple bill of strangely mesmerizing and surprisingly beautiful films that all happen to feature children.