Monday, August 4, 2014

The Child Molester (1964, Herbert J. Leder)

Pretty fucked up old scare-film put out by the Highway Safety Foundation to get young children aware of the dangers of pedos. We get a dramatized example of two girls - ages 8 and 9 - who are lured off the playground by an arcane stranger, offering handfuls of irresistible jelly beans. He drives the terrified girls out into the woods where one runs off and a chase ensues...

This bit of intense horror is intercut with an informational voiceover teaching boys and girls how to avoid getting snatched up, raped and murdered by unassuming child predators, using a variety of exemplar situations - one involving a small boy getting felt up in a movie theater. Between these lessons, we cut back to the girls running for their lives as well as their helpless parents talking with the cops. The end shows actual police crime scene film of two murdered girls who had been dumped in muddy pond by a molester.

"The Child Molester" is pretty heavy shit for it's time and isn't nearly as ass-backwards in it's cautionary logic as many other films of it's kind about homosexuals, marijuana, etc. I could really see this one freaking out some 60s adolescents.

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