Apaches

This is an infamous 1977 short from the United Kingdom: 

It is about the danger from children playing on rural farms, from the director of The Long Good Friday. During each Spooky Season, there’s been more than fictional movies that are reviewed. I’ve covered cartoon shorts, documentaries, other public safety films, etc. This fall there could be even more variety depending on if certain things can be fit into my schedule. Apaches obviously left an impression on none other than Edgar Wright; he’s recommended the short in the past.

What the title references: six children run around a random British village then mosey their way to a farm, while cosplaying as Apache Indians, to use a term from the time. The reason why this is infamous & traumatized many of the youth in the UK: the children are killed via accidents and no F’s were given. Example: the first kid is run over via falling off a flatbed towed by a tractor. Not only do you see the flatbed run over something, a toy rifle is shattered and there’s some blood shown! I won’t spoil all the deaths but there’s someone who accidentally drinks a mysterious liquid; their subsequent screams due to their poisoning… rather chilling.

As an adult, it is affecting to see children act like typical children on a dreary working farm (complete w/ adults along with cows and pigs) and suffer accidental deaths. During all this, a child narrates their parents holding “a party” & how they don’t like adult parties. The final scene explains what this “party” is. That along with a final text scroll noting actual deaths by children on farms in the UK… blunt, although at the same time the images and messages presented in Apaches were seared into the memory of all the children that viewed it at school.

As it was better-made production-wise than you’d expect from a random PSA, that made this fascinating for a dumb middle-aged American dude like me.