“If you love someone, you want to kill them.”

The first question posed by The Nightcomers has to be "how did Brando get up in that tree?"

As monsyllabic gardener Peter Quint, we first see Brando playing hide and seek with children Flora and Miles. They run past, oblivious to the fact that he is sitting high up in a tree watching them. No longer the fit young man he once was, it must have taken some effort to get up there.

The Nightcomers is a prequel to Henry James’ Turn Of The Screw, with Miles and Flora the (Railway) children left in the care of governess (Stephanie Beacham) and maid (Thora Hird) at the home of their dead parents.

Quint was the gardener, but is now given free reign to wander about giving cigarettes to frogs and other essential jobs. The kids like his truly original take on life far more than stuffy old Beacham's boring old lessons, and gradually come under his spell.

As is Beacham, who spends much of the film being maliciously ill-treated by the cocky varmint. Typical exchanges involve her calling him a "brute" before acquiesing to being tied up like a "chicken on a spit" (his words). Disturbingly, the children have been spying on the couple's kinky games and are starting to act them out themselves.

As the kids start practising voodoo and Miles fantasises about shooting Hird in the throat with an arrow (the only vaguely horrific image, at 52 minutes in), a chance remark by Brando leads to his and Beacham's eventual downfall.

Director Michael “Death Wish” Winner does a good job with the scenery (every shot looks gorgeous - all misty and wintery), but because it's a prequel to the scary goings-on of The Turn Of The Screw, it just sort of ends. Plus you get Brando doing a boring and unnecessary bit of improv to camera (as has been noted elsewhere, it's like Winner didn't dare tell him to shut up) which kills the whole thing stone dead. Luckily, Beacham is on hand to give one laugh towards the end, as her comedy cross-eyed death face has to be seen to be believed.