RIFLE RANGE BOY: Nature or nurture?

What The Peeper Saw @ Night Hair Child (Diabolica Malicia, 1972)

Directors: James Kelley & Andrea Bianchi

This is what one calls a 2am movie. One which one watches in the still of the early morning when he has insomnia and the rest of the home occupants are snoring away. It starts off sounding like a 70s B-grade soft porn flick with the exotic location, the flaring bell-bottoms and Mediterranean weather. Then there is the intimacy between a teenage son and his stepmother, who is barely a decade older. A murder is thrown in, and then an attempted murder...

When it comes to young kids acting way out of their leagues, we often say that they are merely reacting to the external stimuli that they are exposed to. We look at their parents' (or lack thereof) parenting skills. We try to place the blame squarely on either parent for what they did or did not - for being absent at school functions or failing to offer a shoulder to cry on when the situation had warranted.

Britt Ekland

Nobody blames the company or the friends they decide to keep. Oh, yes! They blame it on the parents, too, as if parents can hawk on their choice of friends. And the list of virtual (it used to be invisible) friends is too tricky to keep track of. Nobody talks about the unrestricted ease of access to smut available to them. And with so much pressure there for children to grow up fast, nothing is easy.

Every child is assumed to be born as pristine as a white piece of cloth, and his caregiver apparently paints the patterns and hues on them. Really? Are all children the end product of their parent's upbringing? We know there is no 'one-way-fit-all' system to work for all. There surely must be children who, by biology, are innately evil. Science has shown that human beings are conditioned to 'behave' in a particular fashion with social conditioning anyway. Left to their own devices, people would just act to fulfil their primal desires.

Marcus Lester

This 1972 production created a lot of controversies when it was released with its quite liberal exhibition of the female body and even an implied underage sex scene. It is the story of a twelve-year-old boy whose mother died in a bathtub. His father brings home a new girlfriend. She finds this angelic boy a little too precarious and acting weird. As the movie progresses, we realise that the pubescent boy has some unsettling behaviours like peeping on courting couples, killing cats just for the kick of it and even peeping and even murdering his biological mother!