****SPOILERS**** Things went downhill fast for Belle Adams, Hayley Mills, right from the start in the crazy & bizarre film. Getting a ride to the Greenwood train station at a local truck stop. Belle is attacked by the horny trucker who just couldn't keep his eyes off her shapely legs instead of keeping his eye on the road. Being picked up by the drunk, he was celebrating his birthday, Stephen Slade, Simon Ward, a few minutes later Belle soon realizes that he's no better then the horny trucker who attempted to rape her! That in just how weird as well as disconnected from reality he is. Not getting in time to Greenwood to catch her train Belle soon forgets where she's going and stays with Stephen who seems to have developed a crush on her.Endlessly driving around the English countryside and seeming to be going nowhere Belle soon leaves Stephen to buy some groceries at a local Food-Mart. It's then that she's confronted by this what looks like grizzly looking six foot five inch Lepechaun Malcolm Roberts played by, who was touted back in the 1940's as being the most handsome man in Hollywood, the unkempt and disheveled Sterling Hayden. It's Roberts who soon finds out, by looking at the days newspaper headline, that a inmate escaped from the Greenwood Mental Hospital who from the photo fits the description of Stephen Slade. In tying to warn Belle about him Roberts comes up short in not being able to keep up with them in his hopped-up looking 1930's jalopy.****MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS**** In trying to figure out what's exactly going on in the movie we do get a major clue in a number of flashbacks involving Belle and her overly creepy and hot in the pants duck-billed looking Uncle Peter Jeffrey. It was Uncle Peter who molested Belle when she was a little girl that in fact ended up screwing up her head. And it was Belle's reaction to Uncle Peter's grouping and rape of her that in fact had her institutionalized! The trouble is that the clueless Stephen is totally unaware of that and in the end he's soon to become her next victim!

I don't think any normal person would claim this film's opening scenes are pregnant with possibility. There are all the symptoms of a cheap horror flick -- the lurid colors, the tinny electronic score, the conceit of the killer's point of view, the murders -- three of them -- before the opening credits roll and one murder immediately after. The first killing has a pretty British nurse killed in a hospital after being injected with some kind of potion, gasping, legs kicking, underpants showing. Night time. Few lights, mostly red or a bleached, ghoulish green, and blinding white. Ominous. All portending a ride through the Haunted House at Disneyland.We never get to see the psychotic killer during his or her escape from the booby hatch. So who could it be? There are myriad red herrings. Simon Ward, "Young Winston," looks awfully suspicious when we first see him at a roadside stop, playing a slot machine and staring at himself in the mirror. Would any sane person look at himself in a mirror? I know I wouldn't. Then there's Hayley Mills -- oh, so innocent; maybe TOO innocent, with her plump lower lip and those shapely knees. The director, by the way, seems to have a thing for knees. Well, in Hayley Mills' case, he can't be blamed. And, after all, Luis Bunuel was into shoes and Walt Disney spent a lot of time around animals.Then there is Sterling Hayden who brings a bit of color to a familiar story of hitch hikers and maniacs. He's dressed like Captain Ahab and has a bushy gray beard of a retired Civil War general. He puts more energy into his brief role as an old blowhard than he has in any other performance, outside of "Dr. Strangelove," where the effort was masked by his real acting skills.Among the felicities, Mills' knees aside, there are those cute British phone booths. I don't know why America can't make its phone booths out of wood and paint them a bright crimson. They look sturdy, and comfortable enough to spend hours in. Among the weaknesses, well, an example. At a gas station, Ward happens upon a window through which he sees a young woman undressing and getting into what appears to be a uniform shirt. While the camera gapes at her figure, there are interpolated cuts, three or four of them, to the gigantic close up of Ward's single blue eye. The effect is almost surreal but that isn't what the director and editor intended. They just did it because one of them, seized by a brain storm, said something like, "Shouldn't we have a big close up of the actor's eye, so that we know he's still peeping?" Imagine Hitchcock cutting back and forth from Janet Leigh's undressing to a bulging close up of Anthony Perkins' eyeball.There are flashbacks heralded by slow camera movement into a close up, followed by a dissolve, harp music, the flashback with its edges blurred. Both actors suffer from them. Mill's are about her happy youth, riding a horse along the beach, until we reach the part where she was sexually abused as a child. (Zzzz.) Ward's are about impotence. The logic of the tale is flawed; Ward and Mills quarrel when they first meet, but before you know it, and without adumbration, Mills is actively protecting him -- because he might have accidentally killed an aggressive motorcyclist.The ending emerges from the shadows and the identity of the murdering lunatic is revealed. If it's a surprise, it's only because some earlier incidents have made this ending impossible.

From a personal perspective, this film has much in common with "Schizo". I watched them both on the big screen shortly after they were released, and watched them again recently. Both are low budget efforts with somewhat improbable plots; both have dashes of nudity from the damsel – this with somewhat less; both have endings decidedly at odds with their respective narratives. And both deliver."Deadly Strangers" is part road movie, part mystery, and part psychological thriller. Clearly the road movie element is a tall order in a country a fraction of a size of the United States, but every work of honest fiction is entitled to some poetic licence.Herein, former child star Hayley Mills plays a young woman who clearly has issues, and just as clearly has more on her plate than missing the last train home. The big question: Is her enigmatic companion the escaped lunatic, and if so, will the police arrive in time? To find out for certain you must wait until the very end.

"Deadly Strangers" is a unique original, but sadly also little known and underrated highlight of British exploitation of the early 70's. Hammer Studios were still active around that era and they absorbed most of the horror fans' attention, but there were nevertheless quite a number of British films that dared to go a little further. More specifically with controversial themes, perverted characters, shocking images and obscene sexual undertones. There's the oeuvre of director Pete Walker ("Frightmare", "House of Whipcord") but also plentiful of other neglected titles like "The Mind of Mr. Soames", "Innocent Bystanders" and this "Deadly Strangers". The film is very low-budgeted but thrives completely on suspense, picturesque West-British landscapes and the sublime performances of the leading Hayley Mills and Simon Ward. "Deadly Strangers" is, in fact, some kind of crossover between road-movie and psycho horror. The film opens with hectic and unclear shots of a psychiatric patient violently breaking out of an asylum by attacking a nurse and a security guard. The next day, a quirky young lady (Mills) is looking for a lift in a roadside dinner full of sleazy truckers. She narrowly escapes an attempted rape before she gets offered a lift in the pouring rain by a young guy named Stephen. We learn pretty fast that Stephen is a bit of a troubled mind, since he drinks and has voyeuristic tendencies. Belle herself isn't completely without issues, neither, as she suffers from flashbacks about a perverted uncle. While the entire police force searches for the escaped lunatic, these two cruise through the region and attempt to dodge as many road blocks and identity checks as possible. The script of "Deadly Strangers" is fairly predictable, especially if you're familiar with this sort of raunchy zero-budgeted exploitation movies, but director Sidney Hayers nevertheless attempts to keep the viewer alert and doubting with a series of effective and less effective red herrings until the very last minute of the film. Speaking of which, Hayers' direction is surefooted and reliable as always. He's the same professional genre wizard who previously made the classics "Circus of Horror", "Night of the Eagle" and the British giallo "Assault!". Simon Ward and particularly Hayley Mills give away stellar performances as the oddly behaving strangers. There's also a fantastic guest role for Sterling Hayden as a flamboyant English gentleman with an antique car and long beard.