John Carpenter's
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

Beware of the children

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Review

The description of 'sleepy' seems perfect for the small town of Midwich, but it becomes frighteningly real when everyone in the whole place falls asleep at the exact same time. Fortunately, they all wake up at the same time as well, but things get stranger still when it becomes clear all the women of childbearing age in the town are pregnant. The children are born with striking hair and eyes and it becomes clear that they have mental powers that could lead them to become the dominant race on the planet. How, though, do you fight those who can read and your mind and, even worse, control it?

First off, it's not John Carpenter's Village of the Damned it's John Wyndham's, not least because the production namechecks the script for the 1960 version, which cleaves closely to the original novel, The Midwich Cuckoos. That version is a very well thought of sci-fi chiller that hasn't lost any of its power to chill over the decades. Who better, then, to update it than John Carpenter, who had shown a mastery of tension and menace in films such as HALLOWE'EN, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, THE FOG (whose small town this most resembles), CHRISTINE and THE THING?

Original commentators dismissed Carpenter as a successful schlockmeister, an efficient purveyor of cinematic shock. Since then, his career has been reassessed to that of an established auteur whose films never quite made it into the mainstream, mainly due to their genre subject matters. Our opinion is that Carpenter's films are never as good as you remembered them, but almost always as cool as you remembered them. This was certainly true of his earlier years. VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, however, comes from the later, declining years. It does, however buck the trend by being probably better than you remember, though it was never cool in the first place. It is a solid adaptation of the story that suffers mainly by comparison with the better original and a script that doesn't quite capture strangeness of the concept.

The town falling asleep en masse should be a deeply disturbing image, but it is presaged by whispering shadows that undermine the event itself. We know from the off that something is coming, so it is hardly surprising, or terrifying, when it arrives. In fact, by the time the two main characters discover the strange event exists, it's over and everyone is waking up again. This being a Carpenter film, there are a couple of characters who don't make it through the blackout, one in a very gruesome, graphic way (one of the very few gory bits in the entire film).

The effect of the mass pregnancies on the people of the town are rushed through in order to get the children born and the real menace started. Since we are only introduced to a few characters who are more than simply background sketches, we are not really in a position to understand and sympathise with the strangeness of what is happening to the townsfolk. The subsequent decline as villagers move away is shown in a montage, but not really addressed. The later suicide of a virgin girl who was made pregnant barely impacts at all because we were not really introduced to her or saw how this affected her. She simply says she can't hack it and her end comes off screen, glimpsed in moment of mind-reading but not in an affecting way. A mother's punishment forn giving one of the children hot soup ought to be horrendous, but since we don't really know her it falls flat beyond the initial wince. Her end doesn't even have the initial wince. Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley and Linda Koslowski are all perfectly adequate in the main roles, though hardly revelatory, whilst Mark Hamill is positively wasted as a priest whose later confrontation with the children is a complete damp squib.The surface gloss of the production can't make up for the shallowness of the script and flatness of all but the main characters.

As with the original version, the children are the film's greatest asset, but here again the film doesn't live up to the previous version. The uniformly blonde, almost white, hair that was so unearthly in the original just looks like wigs in this colour remake. The effects on the eyes, however, are very nicely done and expand as the children's power increases. When they fan out across a road to face an incoming mob (with flaming torches yet, though no pitchforks) they have a very real menacing air to them. The leader of the group manages to be threatening, but not enough is made of their alien nature and otherness. There is one scene of large scale destruction when the children take on the police and military, to deadly effect.

You know something's wrong when a horror film's creepiest moment is a line of cars driving down to the birthing centre all at the same time. The reveal of the one still-born child ought to be shocking, but the prop used is more likely to raise a sneer than gooseflesh. Somehow, all of the tension and fear raised by Carpenter in THE FOG is absent here. In the end, it's a mildly diverting take on the story, but you would be better advised to seek out the original.