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Apache

NIGHTMARE-INDUCING PRODUCTION, shown to kids in school assemblies to learn them of the dangers of arseing about with dangerous farming equipment. Narrated by a teenager and concerning a group of his mates playing on a farm, who proceed to get killed in the most uncompromising manner imaginable for 9.30 in the morning: one’s chopped up in a combine harvester, one drinks some poison, one drives over the cliff in a tractor, and one has his head smashed in by a heavy metal gate post. Beat singing hymns out of Come And Praise, that’s for sure.

5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. Lee James Turnock

    April 30, 2010 at 5:07 pm

    Its proper title was Apaches, because the kids were playing at cowboys and Indians. This half-hour exercise in nightmare-inducing horror was actually directed by John McKenzie, who later directed Bob Hoskins in the Long Good Friday. One of the old blokes from Monty Python’s Crimson Permanent Assurance sketch turns up at the end, as the last dead kid’s grandfather.

  2. Droogie

    February 17, 2020 at 5:08 am

    This film terrified me as a kid. Not only were we made to see it in school several times ( on a 16mm projector in a dark school hall that made it all creepier), but they’d also occasionally show it on TV in my HTV region on Sunday afternoons after the farming programmes. The daft thing was that where I lived in Cardiff had no farms anywhere near me to play and die on, so I can’t understand why I was bombarded with this safety film so much. I remember the Video Nasty scare that came a few years later and how kids needed protecting from seeing such horror, but how it was perfectly ok to make us sit through traumatic viewing like this! I watched it again a few years ago on YouTube to see if it still frightened, and it still disturbs. So many unpleasant moments, but the end credits listing the name of every child to die in a UK farmyard accident in the previous 5 years while a ghostly school choir sings in the background is especially messed-up!

  3. THX 1139

    February 17, 2020 at 10:13 am

    I lived in a kind of rural area too, and saw this on TV one Sunday afternoon. I suppose it did its work because I never went and played on a farm, but such scenes as “Mummy! MUMMEEEEE!!!” are imprinted on my mind even to this day. It really is completely horrible. And coming out on Blu-ray soon!

    As an aside, another rural PIF was the hypothermia one, with the bloke wandering through the snow until the Army rescue catch up with him. It gave you instructions on what to do (“This man is not drunk”). However even in this internet age, the whole two minutes, which I saw so often I knew it off by heart, has utterly disappeared. It only exists in memory, because somehow nobody taped it. Did nobody in rural areas have a VCR?

  4. Droogie

    February 17, 2020 at 7:14 pm

    The scene with the dying girl screaming for her Mummy after drinking weedkiller is particularly blood chilling. The way it’s shot by not showing her dying but instead having a night time exterior shot of her bedroom window with her last screams followed by a shot next day of her empty bedroom with her parents removing her stuff is difficult to forget.

    I don’t recall the hypothermia safety film. There was a BFI DVD out years back called Stop Look Listen that collected all these films, but don’t believe that was on it.

  5. THX 1139

    February 18, 2020 at 10:29 am

    Yeah, it’s like a nightmare version of the end of Jamie and the Magic Torch.

    The hypothermia PIF should have been on Network’s Charlie Says compilation, ideally. But it wasn’t, and the BFI haven’t picked it for a release out either, when they took over the COI stuff. I shall continue to be patient… there’s that and the “Let’s do it again!” helicopter training safety thing where they dunk a copter in a tank of water and the crew have to escape that has never showed up in all these years either.

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