Veld

According to 'wikipedia', VELD was billed as "The First Soviet Horror Movie" and maybe it was but "Sci-Fi" is a much better fit. The film combines a couple of Ray Bradbury short stories, foremost being "The Veldt" which first saw the light of day in "The Saturday Evening Post" back in 1950 and was source for a few portmanteau films over the years, most notably THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. The terrors of modern technology was its theme and the action takes place in a not-too-distant future where "The Happylife Home" takes care of all the family's needs. Children are raised in virtual reality nurseries and one young couple becomes alarmed when they hear the sound of roaring lions after their two kids, Peter and Wendy (in a nod to James M. Barrie), spend all their time in there imagining an African veldt. That's just the starting point in a film that, despite its muted colors and oppressive gloom, closely resembles the work of Italian horrormeister Mario Bava when it comes to spooky tableaux. Other subplots include an old couple who see their young son, dead forty years, outside in the moonlight one night and what appears to be a plague has broken out when hazmat-suited "sanitation workers" in tanks begin dragging bodies out of houses. The Russians also did filmic justice to Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" around the same time and they obviously had a knack for faithful adaptation. Pretty good.