Urge to Kill (1960)

Urge to Kill is a 1960 British B-movie serial killer film, directed by Vernon Sewell and starring Patrick Barr, Ruth Dunning and Terence Knapp. The film is based on the novel Hughie Roddis and play Hand in Glove, both by Gerald Savory. It is regarded as a minor cult film thanks to its unrelenting shabby grimness and some unintentionally comic, dated and politically incorrect dialogue – one suspect is repeatedly referred to as "a mental case", while the police, trying to work out why one hapless victim was selected for her grisly fate, speculate "perhaps she was a Jezebel."

Synopsis

While making her way home from the cinema one night in a particularly grey and drab town, a young woman is murdered in an unusually brutal and sadistic manner. Local suspicion immediately falls on Hughie (Knapp), a strangely behaved and not very bright local youth who has a habit of wandering aimlessly around the town at all hours randomly collecting stray bits and pieces, with a particular fondness for broken glass – which unfortunately for Hughie happens to have been one of the weapons used in the fatal attack.

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