Village of the Damned ** (1995, Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Michael Paré, Mark Hamill) – Classic Movie Review 3194

In a village in Marin County, everyone falls asleep and, when they wake up six hours later, ten women, including a virgin, are pregnant. Nine months after, there are ten lookalike babies all with white hair and pale skin who grow up to display psychic powers.

Christopher Reeve stars in this in-your-face remake that lacks the eerie poetry of both John Wyndham’s source novel The Midwich Cuckoos and the original 1960 movie Village of the Damned directed by Wolf Rilla, and can’t find the right shock excitements to substitute for it. Rough and robust, Village of the Damned is a typical work of director John Carpenter, but he is not particularly on form here and the normally brilliant Industrial Light & Magic visual effects are below par.

Dr Alan Chaffee (Reeve) and his wife Barbara (Karen Kahn) are the parents of one creepy, too clever little daughter, Mara (Lindsey Haun). In odd casting, Kirstie Alley also stars as Dr Susan Verner, the chain-smoking government doctor on the case and Mark Hamill as the local reverend gentleman, the Reverend George.

David Himmelstein’s screenplay is based on John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi novel The Midwich Cuckoos about a rash of births of alien changelings, though transferred from its English village setting to a village in Marin County, and with a creepy little girl replacing a creepy little boy as the main child. The film also credits the original 1960 movie screenplay by Wolf Rilla, Stirling Silliphant and Geoffrey Barclay.

Also in the cast are Linda Kozlowski, Michael Paré, Meredith Salenger, Constance Forslund, Buck Flower, Thomas Dekker, Pippa Pearthree, Peter Jason, Cody Dorkin, Trishalee Hardy, Jessye Quarry, Adam Robbins and Chelse DeRidder.

On a $22 million cost, it took only less than $10 million at the US box office. Thus there was no cinema release in the UK and it went straight to video. It was released on DVD in 2000.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3194

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Martin Stephens in the original 1960 movie Village of the Damned.