VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1995)
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1995 Ben Hoffman
There have been several movie versions of John Wyndham's stories, none of which I have seen. Director John Carpenter thought the film's story would be improved if it were made more current. I don't much like the genre of spooky films but I must say this one has a somewhat better twist than most of that type.
There's a little town of Midwich where nothing exciting ever happens. Every now and then a cloud, accompanied by ominous sounds, passes over the town, and strange thing begin to happens. Dr. Chaffee (Christopher Reeve) finds he is being besieged by an inordinate number of women who have become pregnant. He then becomes aware that the conceptions took place on the same day, the day of a school outing ... and that the cloud had passed over the town.
Suspicious that something odd is going on, Dr. Chaffee calls on the Federal Government to send someone to investigate this new phenomenon. The epidemiologist they send is Dr Susan Verner (Kristie Alley) who, by the way, is a chain smoker. Has no one told her about the dangers of smoking?
Of the ten children who are born, nine survive, apparently healthy. They all look very much alike with piercing eyes and whitish blond hair which gives rise to the reasonable assumption that they were all sired by the same "father." As the boys and girls grow, they begin to display weird, un-childlike behavior. If they focus their eyes on you (in a strange color), you will be involved in a fatal accident very shortly. Everyone soon realizes that these kids are not to be antagonized or thwarted.
That's pretty much the basis for the film. What the children do, what Dr. Chaffee and Dr. Vermeer do to try to stop what is happening is what makes up the film. Incidentally, there have, according to Dr. Vermeer, been similar incidents recently in other parts of the world. OoooooHHHHHooooo!.
Others in the cast include Linda Koslowski, Michael Pare, Mark Hamill and Karen Kahn, among others.
2 bytes 4 Bytes = Superb 3 Bytes = Too good to be missed. 2 Bytes = So so. 1 Byte = Save your money.
Ben Hoffman
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews