Basically Folk Devils and Moral Panics meets Day of the Triffids:
The movie is a catalogue of ideas that would inflame guardians of England’s public image. A seaside town is depicted as overrun by a pack of unruly Teddy Boys [ME: They’re “rockers,” not Teds…], biker hoodlums led by King (Oliver Reed), a sullen thug with incestuous designs on his sister Joan (Shirley Anne Field). The gang uses Joan as bait to mug Simon, an American tourist disenchanted with modern life (MacDonald Carey). Simon meets the bohemian artist Freya (Viveca Lindfors, in her best role), a free-spirit sculptress of subversive statues resembling the charred remains of Hiroshima victims. Freya is in turn the mistress of Bernard (Alexander Knox), a stuffy executive in charge of an ultra top-secret military experiment. It is so secret, Bernard says, that should he tell Freya about it he “might be condemning her to death.”
