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Much like Carpenter’s landmark 1982 film The Thing, Village of the Damned is a remake of a earlier film, Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned released in 1960, which itself was based on the novel “The Midwich Cuckoos” by John Wyndham (who also wrote “The Day of the Triffids”). On a day like any other, every living resident in the town of Midwich, men, women and animals, experience a complete and total blackout, no matter what they were doing. After about 4 hours everyone awakes, perfectly fine (the one who weren’t operating heavy machinery at least) except for one particular issue: Several women are now pregnant. As most of us know, pregnancy can lead to babies, and so it is here as well. Only thing is, these babies are as mysterious as their origins. Not only are they intelligent, but as they grow up they gain extraordinary abilities, which they then turn on the townsfolk of Midwich with a grim regularity. With people dropping of left and right, it seems like town doctor Alan Chaffee (Christopher Reeve) might be Midwich’s only hope. What are these children? What do they want? And perhaps the most pressing question of all, is there anything that can stop them?
Like with Terry Gilliam and the other directors in Thunderbird Hall of Fame, I think the main reason I always like to return to John Carpenter is that his films have this air about them that definitively identifies them as Carpenter. I’m not sure if I can identify it accurately, but the films of his that I’ve seen take the visual approach of Hitchcock and through the use of innovative special effects brings it to a surreal, often grotesque conclusion, all done with the cynical eye birthed from the dirty, dirty 1970’s. Sometimes it’s subtle, as in Halloween, and occasionally it’s right in your face, but it’s always there to push his films onto their own little pedestals. There are slasher movies and then there’s Halloween, there are sci-fi movies and then there’s They Live, and so on. The calling card of the Carpenter is unmistakable.
So it is with Village of the Damned, a work which seems to return the uncomplicated suspense of Halloween and Christine. There’s no head-spiders or mystical Chinese warriors here, just some emotionless white-haired children with glowing eyes walking in pairs. As iconic an image as anything else from Carpenter’s filmography, and effective precisely because it’s so simple. They look at you, and you end up doing something you don’t want to do. No need for big expensive effects, the fear comes from seeing the victims having control over themselves and their actions ripped away with gruesome results. Something which no one wants to experience, but can certainly imagine.
Unfortunately, this ties into my biggest problem with the film, which is that I strongly dislike stories in which agency is completely removed from the characters. Once it is established that the children are practically gods and that there’s nothing the adults can do to stop them, it immediately becomes less of a thriller to me and more torture porn, torturous for me because I still have to wait an hour before the film drags itself to a conclusion. Same with the character deaths, which have that Carpenter gruesomeness, but don’t have much of an emotional impact because the characters barely enter the scene before they’re immediately killed off. It’s the same kind of problem I had with Rosemary’s Baby, a film which I slagged off despite it having such critical and commercial acclaim. Rosemary accomplishes absolutely nothing in that film, nor does she ever come close to it, so what’s the point in watching? Which doesn’t mean I don’t like downer endings in my stories, all of my favorite directors have done it, I just don’t like being bored out of my skull when it happens. To it’s credit we do get a bit of action towards the end, and Carpenter does set the stage for the climax earlier in the film, but by the time the film got there I was just ready for it to be over. Also the ending of Scanners did something similar but did it better.
Acting-wise, there’s not much to say. Christopher Reeve is pretty good, showing some dramatic range that you never really got to see in the Superman. Kirstie Alley is ok but kind of onenote by the nature of her character. Always nice to see Mark Hamill on screen even if he wasn’t all that important to the plot, and everyone else I didn’t recognize and probably came across as far more interesting in the original story.
Music-wise, apparently Carpenter shared soundtrack duties with Dave Davies, one of the members of the insanely good and insanely underrated English band of The Kinks. While a connection could be made to Carpenter’s previous musical contributions to his films, I didn’t really make the Davies connection until I looked more into the film’s production. While it’s not horrible by any means, I think both men have done better work.
John Carpenter tends to get a lot of flak from people for the later part of his career, and the films he directed during that period have never gotten the kind of love that his work in the early 80’s. Some of them, like inevitable Marathon entry Ghosts of Mars, is downright despised if Rotten Tomatoes is anything to go by. However, although I have my issues with Village of the Damned, I wouldn’t say it’s a film devoid of merit or unworthy of attention, and for that reason I’m giving it a tentative recommendation. Carpenter’s made better movies, but there are plenty of people out there that have made worse. If you’re a fan of the original Outer Limits or that one episode of The Twilight Zone where Bill Mumy is sending folks to the cornfield, then try out this little number this Halloween and see how you like it. And if you’re ever in the town of Midwich, avoid the barbecue. You’ll never know what you’re gonna get.
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