BRING ME CHILDREN

Martin follows his striking Lie to Me (1990) with a horrific West Virginia gothic about a flipped-out TV anchorman's investigation of a physician with a special interest in babies. After he bursts into tears on the air over a story about child abuse, cold-fish newscaster John Lyon (``his Lordship'') is eased into a leave of absence given sudden direction by wizened black nurse Claire Cept: moments before she jumps in front of a taxi, Claire sticks him with a box of evidence against suave, blind Dr. Mason Quinndell—a man who raped her 14-year-old granddaughter and taunted her, years later, with stories of all the children he'd murdered. On arriving in Hameln, Lyon's greeted by a cast of grotesques ranging from Randolph Welby, a puzzled dwarf who's been rescuing Quinndell's victims and hiding them in a cave until they die, to a disappearing corpse in a coffin, who turns out to be Claire's living and very determined granddaughter, and who insists he go up against Quinndell and a scary crew of accomplices including: Mary Aurora, an inoffensive prostitute posing as Quinndell's nurse until her indentured year ends in a fat payoff and an introduction to her own long-since-adopted daughter; Carl, a brainless, obese sheriff's deputy equally devoted to Quinndell; and Mr. Spoon and Mr. Gigli, Quinndell's favorite torture toys, which will come out into the open for a spectacularly gruesome Fourth of July climax. As before, grisly tableaux—set with the kind of poetic sensitivity that makes them even more shocking—unerringly reflect psychosocial horrors beneath: there's nothing gratuitous in Martin's baroque encounter with evil. Strong stuff, no matter how you look at it.