The script also invests more time in exploring the cold superiority of the children, giving them a number of opportunities to lecture in favour of hard Social Darwinism. There is a subplot about how one of the children comes to discover emotions and ultimately gets spared at the end. The battle lines are far more ambiguously drawn than they were in the 1960s. John Carpenter also turns in his weakest score yet.ĭavid Himmelstein’s script has made some effort to ring up new and interesting nuances on the original Village of the Damned. Most of the rest of the the cast are subdued – Michael Paré is one of the four cast members who gets poster billing despite being killed at the beginning after having only a couple of moments of screen time. John Carpenter certainly has a good cast on hand, including Christopher Reeve just one month before the accident that left him paralysed, and the always watchable Kirstie Alley, who plays with sardonic humour. By the time of an oversized police shootout with cars and helicopters exploding, the remake reaches an overwhelming sense of pointlessness. The only one of these conducted with any imagination is the scene where Kirstie Alley is forced to conduct unanaesthetised DIY surgery on herself. In lieu of any of the psychological atmosphere of the original, all that John Carpenter seems to do is substitute a shock killing every few minutes – Mark Hamill blowing his own head off with a rifle George ‘Buck’ Flower jumping from a roof Michael Paré crashing in his pickup and so on. More importantly, Village of the Damned 1995 never grips you with an eeriness the way that the original did. Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley (behind binoculars) watch from the military cordon line However, the children’s effectiveness is undone by a set of unconvincing wigs that make them look like blonde refugees from Beatlemania. One moment where she smiles and mockingly calls Christopher Reeve ‘Daddy’ is great.
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED 1995 TORRENT PATCH
The children’s leader Lindsey Haun plays well – although is not a patch on Martin Stephens in the original. John Carpenter occasionally achieves some effect, particularly when it comes to the alienness of the children. In this case, John Carpenter’s remake of Village of the Damned only succeeds in missing everything that made the original so tautly atmospheric. It is doubly disappointing in that Carpenter also made The Thing (1982), a remake of the 1950s classic The Thing from Another World (1951), which succeeded in brilliantly redefining the original. This remake comes from John Carpenter, the cult genre director responsible for the likes of Dark Star (1974), Halloween (1978), Escape from New York (1981), Starman (1984) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).Īlas, Village of the Damned is probably the weakest film in John Carpenter’s generally worthwhile oeuvre and falls well short of its predecessor. It also spawned a lesser sequel with Children of the Damned (1964). It was crafted with an eerie tension that travelled well into that place of psychological anxiety that the better American equivalents of that era inhabited. Village of the Damned (1960), based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), was a British entry into the 1950s alien invader genre.
0 kommentar(er)
