Le Village des damnés

Village of the Damned is a remake of a 1960 British movie of the same title. The movie kicks off with all of the residents of the California town of Midwich suddenly falling unconscious. Exactly six hours later they regained consciousness and ten of the women were found to be pregnant. The result of those pregnancies were platinum blond kids with strange behavior, super intelligence, and mental telepathy. The '95 version give us color and more special effects, but it's not a better product. I thought they'd insert some modern day tricks to try to eliminate the children threats, but there would be none of that. In the end, there was no reason to remake this movie.

Being a John Carpenter fan, I expected way more than I got. Thirty five years after the original and you would think there would be a lot of improvement. The bad deeds were more interesting. The children's glowing eyes did seem more wicked. But these things did not save this movie. Groups of women around the world are having emotionless children that have a way of dismissing people they don't like. Greedy, unfriendly and power hungry little kids from WHEREVER! Kirstie Alley and Linda Kozlowski seemed to have taken their parts pretty seriously. Mark Hamill was more or less wasted. Cold popcorn rates over Christopher Reeve. I can't blame Mr. Carpenter for the finished project. I'm sure he meant well with what he had to work with.

The original Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) was a very good movie. Why remake it? It was very good because every plot point was simple and not overstated, which helped create tension with little. The Carpenter movie only "adds" useless stuff to the basic premise of evil children mysteriously conceived during the blackout of an entire village. More graphic violence, longer discussions about the phenomenon: isn't the tension better if we are left to let the violence grow in our global experience, not just as artifacts of the story? Dozens of cops, soldiers, firemen... and the token government scientist blinded by her outstanding research: this is no longer a small village cut from the world, this is a disaster movie set. I can't understand the urge for Carpenter to shoot such a bad script while the original story and adaptation must have been way better.

This is one of my favourite movies, one of the very few horror movies that don't scare me, and I prefer the ending of this over the original movie. I have the book this is based off, and this is one of the very few movies that I can watch more than once without growing bored of it. My favourite part is that David stands out the most (in a good way) among the alien children and he's my favourite character in the movie along with how he can feel empathy and he can understand people's feelings. He has a heart and he's misunderstood, but that was only because the child he was supposed to be paired with died. It's just amazing to me how it became a mixed blessing, even though the death was bad, but it's helped him out in the way that he's portrayed as a good, but misunderstood. I don't have anything negative at all to say about this movie!