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| Horror |
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DEVIL TIMES FIVE
aka
PEOPLE TOYS
Rating: 
USA. 1974.
Director – Sean MacGregor, Screenplay – John Durren, Story – Dylan Jones, Producers – Jones & Michael Blowitz, Photography – Paul Hipp & Michael Shea, Music – William Loose, Special Effects – Carol Lynn Enterprises, Art Direction – Jack McAnelly. Production Company – Barrister Productions Inc.
Cast:
Taylor Lacher (Rick), Sorrell Booke (Dr Harvey Beckman), Gene Evans (Papa Doc), Joan McCall (Julie), Carolyn Steller (Lovely), Shelley Morrison (Ruth Beckman), John Durren (Ralph), Leif Garrett (David), Gail Smale (Sister Hannah), Tierre Turner (Brian), Tia Thompson (Susan), Dawn Lyn (Moe)
Plot: Two couples arrive at the Copperhead mountain lodge, the two men vying for a job offered by the owner, the notoriously hard-headed Papa Doc. But in the middle of the night they are joined by four children and a novice nun, seeking shelter after their bus overturns nearby. But the children are really killers and now start to slaughter their hosts.
This is quite a professionally made little B-movie. For the first two-thirds of its running time, it doesn’t seem like it is going to be up to much at all. It confines three couples to a snowbound lodge and plays their various tensions off against one another. One supposes they should applaud a horror film that actually stops to flesh out characters rather than treating them as faceless victims with targets painted on their backs, but this spends its time building the characters almost entirely at the expense of generating atmosphere.
Nevertheless things picks up considerably in the last third where Devil Times Five becomes a quite effective play on the whole malevolent children subgenre that grew up out of the previous year’s The Exorcist (1973). There are some undeniably effective scenes with kids hunting adults with rifles, setting beartraps in the snow and one wonderfully malicious scene with them dumping piranha in someone’s bath.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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