Building Sites Bite

Building Sites Bite is a public information film produced for British schools to warn children about the danger of playing on building sites. It was written and directed by David Hughes and produced by Maggie Evans. The film was shot in early 1978 and is 28 minutes in duration. Because of the style of filming and grim subject matter, it is often compared to the earlier films, Apaches and The Finishing Line, both released the previous year.

Plot

The film focuses on Ronald, a young boy who wants to become a builder or surveyor when he grows up. He voices this ambition to his older and more cautious cousins Paul and Jane, who tell him he knows nothing about the hazards of building sites. The cousins then stage a series of elaborate fantasies which are presented as though real: they are in charge of a Star Trek-style teleporter which they use to send Ronald into various building sites and other dangerous areas to look for his lost dog, Snoopy (a Yorkshire Terrier). In each location he is killed by his inability to recognise danger, the dog whining as it sniffs his lifeless hand and the watching cousins shaking their heads over his mistakes. Each time he is restored to life by the teleporter, as cocky as before and ready for another "challenge", except the last time when the cousins have joined him in the danger area and are thus unable to "rescue" him.

Some of the footage of Ronald's deaths is very graphic, showing the boy being buried alive in a trench collapse, electrocuted in a half-demolished house, run over by an earthmoving vehicle, breaking his skull after falling off a pipe against a metal retaining wall, crushed beneath a falling pile of bricks, and ultimately drowning in a disused quarry; each time he is about to die, the sound of a heartbeat is played on the soundtrack to warn viewers and give them a chance to shut their eyes. At the end of the film, and back in the real world, Ronald announces that he has abandoned the idea of working on a building site, and the children go outside to play; over the closing shot of the film, one of the child actors reads out real-life stories of children killed in dangerous areas such as those the viewer has witnessed.

Home viewing availability

Building Sites Bite was finally made available for home viewing by the BFI in 2010, along with other such Public Information Films of the time such as Apaches, on the compilation DVD COI Collection Vol 4: Stop! Look! Listen!

External links

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