VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED: Blu-ray (Universal, 1995) Shout! Factory

The last movie actor, Christopher Reeve committed to before suffering his hellacious riding accident, 1995’s remake of Village of the Damned, is also something of a bittersweet farewell for its director, John Carpenter who, having inculcated his reputation as a roadshow ‘Hitchcock’ with masterful forays into horror throughout the late 1970’s and early 80’s, had steadily watched as this Teflon-coated reputation eroded in the 90’s and beyond. Indeed, by 1995, Carpenter was somewhat best regarded in the industry for his cult following and recent screen failures, rather than his trend-setting successes of yore. Yet, with stylishly inventive source material (John Wyndham’s classy and bone-chilling 1957 novel - The Midwich Cuckoos) and the template of director, Wolf Rilla’s exemplary 1960 movie to crib from, how could any remake of Village of the Damned miss? Alas, in Carpenter’s case – far too easily. The fault this time, arguably, was not Carpenter’s but Universal Studio’s eleventh-hour decision to prune the budget, forcing Carpenter to either truncate or entirely cut several key sequences already shot – presumably, for time constraints. In hindsight, this deprived the picture of virtually all its carefully plotted chills. Various cast members have since echoed the sentiment that the movie they made and the one eventually screened bore little earthly resemblance to one another. And while Carpenter has professed his satisfaction in the finished product, his has been among the hallowed few to find it as impressive a venture to wade through with glowing praise.   

Ever since 1978’s terrorizing reboot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, plans were set in motion to revive Village of the Damned. In 1981, Lawrence Bachmann, head of MGM-British Studios where the original classic had been made, vowed to bring back the terrors of yore, interested in delivering a more faithful adaptation of the original novel. Owing to financial entrenchment, the project eventually found a new home at Universal, whose reputation for crafting quality scare-fare was duly noted. And, as Carpenter and the studio had a lucrative partnership, he became the obvious choice to helm the project.  Carpenter’s decision to relocate the action from a small British village to Inverness and Point Reyes, California, where he had previously shot 1979’s The Fog (and where Carpenter also has his home) seemed a natural. And, reflecting on his version of Village of the Damned today, the absolute best thing about it are the locations, expertly photographed by cinematographer, Gary B. Kibbe, who also shot Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988) and, In the Mouth of Madness (1994) for Carpenter. But Carpenter disliked the original screenplay by David Himmelstein and undertook to rewrite most of it himself, while taking no screen credit for his efforts.

At the time of its release, industry hype was riding high on Carpenter’s name to deliver the goods. And, in featuring such high-profile talents as Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill, Michael Pare and Meredith Salenger, Carpenter must have fervently believed he, at least, had the star cache to pull the thing off. Alas, and regrettably – no – and, mostly for the reason, virtually all of the aforementioned stars came with their own built-in public personas, difficult to shed to truly become invisible as their screen alter egos. Owing to changing times and tastes, Carpenter elected to up the ante in screen violence. Ironically, the general consensus here is that Carpenter hadn’t gone far enough. I will concur with that assessment. Apart from a flash of carnage here and there, and the inference of more yet to follow, though never entirely to materialize, the ‘gross out’ factor in Village of the Damned is remarkably restrained. True enough, Carpenter’s filmmaker’s modus operandi has always been to elevate the horror genre beyond its mere 30-second shock value. But truth to tell, Carpenter remained more invested in finding the right children to play these human/alien hybrids, concentrating almost entirely on their ‘look’, and, subjecting them to multiple screen tests, and later, a chemical dye process to bleach their tresses, instead to result in some of the kiddies’ actual hair falling out. Even so, order rather than chaos reigned supreme on Carpenter’s set with cast and crew admiring the director’s overall investment and professionalism.

Carpenter’s zeal to slavishly recreate the look of the alien children from the original movie came right down to the special effect of their glowing eyes, to convey telepathic mind control over the hapless human victims. In the 1960 movie, shot in B&W, the children’s glowing orbs were superimposed over still frames. For Carpenter’s remake, the effect was upgraded with a transition of colored digital mattes and filters, heightened from green, to orange, and finally, red, then white-hot pulsating to suggest the absolute power of their diabolical minds.  As with Wolf Rilla’s original, Carpenter’s reboot begins with an ominous preamble depicting the small hamlet of Midwich under siege from an invisible threat. This has effectively put the entire town and its surrounding farmlands into a temporary coma. We witness men and women lying unconscious everywhere, caught in a paralytic time warp while performing menial household tasks, bodies strewn in the streets and county fair. Rilla had resisted the urge to punctuate this sequence with any sort of music. Rather obtusely, Carpenter believes it needs one - a much too-too ‘on the nose’ underscore co-authored by him and Dave Davies.

Whereas the 1960 Village of the Damned steadily emerged from this auspicious opener as a superb thriller to haunt its audience under a hypnotic spell of advancing dread, almost from the outset, Carpenter’s remake threatens nothing more or better than a cheap knock-off, albeit, deprived of Rilla’s small-budgeted finesse to cleverly infer what should otherwise best remain unseen. And this remains the biggest misfire Carpenter makes in concocting his remake – rather slavish in his desire a return us to these hallowed horror haunting grounds of yore, without first considering what terrorized an audience in 1960 has long since become unprepossessing nonsense for a more blasé fan base, uncomfortably numbed by nearly three decades of horror/slasher crud. In retrospect, Carpenter’s movie is not as much a reboot as a regurgitation of Rilla’s classic, with a few minor complications thrown in, and even more disposable and gratuitous bits of uber-shock and violence inserted, merely to keep up with, though never to surpass our more jaded times.  

As in the novel, and original movie, the town of Midwich is mysteriously cast into a collective ‘blackout’ from which ten of its women of child-bearing years become pregnant. Just prior to this bizarre coma, grade school principal, Jill McGowan (Linda Kozlowski) asked her husband, Frank (Michael Paré) to fetch a tank of helium for the town’s carnival. Regrettably, during the blackout, an unconscious Frank drives his truck into an oncoming vehicle and is killed. Now, government agents, helmed by Dr. Susan Verner (Kirstie Alley) descend upon the town to launch their investigation into the pregnancies, including Melanie Roberts (Meredith Salenger) who, while still a virgin, appears to have undergone an immaculate conception. While none of the expectant mothers elects to abort their children, each suffers a series of bizarre dreams. Time passes. The women all give birth on the same day. Their deliveries are supervised by Verner, alongside the town’s Dr. Alan Chaffee (Christopher Reeve) whose own wife, Barbara (Karen Kahn) is among those bringing new life into the world.  Alas, Melanie’s child is delivered stillborn and quickly whisked away to a secret location by Dr. Verner. The surviving nine are deemed healthy, but bare an uncanny likeness to one another, sporting albino skin and hair, piercing, cold/dead eyes, and, a superior intellect well beyond their years.

The Chaffee’s daughter, Mara (Lindsey Haun) illustrates the most insidious and powerful command of psychic mind control, forcing Barbara to scald her arm in a pot of boiling water, and later, dictating her suicide by leaping from a nearby cliff adjacent the family’s home. The children pair off with a mate, all except for Jill’s son, David (Thomas Dekker) whose partner ought to have been Melanie’s stillborn daughter. Of the alien children, (Trishalee Hardy as Julie, Jessye Quarry as Dorothy, Adam Robbins as Isaac, John Falk as Matt, Renee Rene Simms as Casey, and, Danielle Keaton as Lily) only David exhibits a hint of understanding for the human side of his DNA and is, thus, considered an outcast by the others. Isolating themselves in a barn on the outskirts of town, the alien children begin to acquire a vast knowledge of the human world while sharing in their complete lack of empathy for it. After several of the town’s citizens die under awful circumstances, including Ben Blum (Peter Jason) who is compelled to drive his pickup into a propane tank, and, Sarah (Pippa Pearthree), the wife of local minster, Father George (Mark Hamill) who is commanded by the children to set herself afire with a torch, Father George attempts to assassinate this motley brood. Instead, he is forced under the children’s mind control to turn his rifle upon himself.

Dr. Verner’s scientific team elect to hurriedly pack up and depart Midwich. Tragically, Verner is cornered by the children to reveal the secret place of their stillborn alien baby. Mara then orders Verner to use a scalpel to disembowel herself. Meanwhile, Dr. Chaffee has found a way to block the children’s mind control. Preparing an attaché full of dynamite, he hurries to the barn where they have gathered. Realizing what Chaffee intends to do, Jill races to the barn to save David from his fate. While Mara and the others concentrate their psychic powers to break through Chaffee’s mental roadblock, Jill rescues David moments before Chaffee’s bomb is detonated, killing him and the rest of the alien/human hybrids. In the final moments, Jill drives at top speeds through the decimated town of Midwich, comforting David by suggesting they will go ‘somewhere’ where nobody knows of their past.

The remake of Village of the Damned is a colossally sloppy, lost opportunity for John Carpenter to reestablish his supremacy as the master of horror. Almost from the outset, the picture seems incapable of generating anything more than a slight unease and, even this, is predicated on familiarity gleaned from the original movie, rather than by anything fresh or exotically terrifying Carpenter ought to have interjected into his remake.  Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley do their best to infer Midwich is in for a very bad time. But their scenes, either together or apart, are brief at best, particularly Alley’s Dr. Verner, who floats in and out of the Himmelstein/Carpenter narrative like a slightly malignant maven, useless to prevent the death of the town, or even her own, if - chronically intrigued by both. Whereas the original movie endeavored to create an ‘us vs. them’, Carpenter’s remake represents Midwich’s humanity as a disjointed troop of yahoos who breezily succumb to their fates. At one point, the local police and military are called in to invade the barn, but instead are compelled to turn upon each other in a horrendous bloodbath. It all makes for a penultimately gruesome scene, meant to be shocking. But by then, an impenetrable ennui has truly taken over Carpenter’s direction, as well as the trajectory of the story.

Undeniably good-looking, thanks to Kibbe’s cinematography, Village of the Damned lacks character development, a definite plot, the proper establishment of the passage of time, and, worst of all, the ominous and palpable cast of fear to make it memorable in its own right. Instead, mediocrity reigns, plunging the shock and horror into unintentional, and not even altogether satisfying camp. Perhaps Carpenter is just out of practice. After a lengthy dispute on his previous pic, They Live (1988), he did not return to the director’s chair until 1992’s silly little nothing, Memoirs of an Invisible Man. 1995’s Lovecraftian horror/fantasy, In the Mouth of Madness seemed to imply Carpenter was on the cusp of regaining lost artistic ground in the horror genre, a suspicion utterly deflated by the theatrical release of Village of the Damned. Rilla’s classic crammed so much panic and danger into just 77-minutes, it is almost insulting that Carpenter, with a considerably larger budget and run-time (his film is 21-mins. longer), cannot achieve even half as much. The more elaborately staged ‘deaths’ of the townsfolk are counterintuitive to what is essentially a small story about a big threat destined to take over the world.

Advanced special effects, generate pulsating, multi-colored eyes for the alien kids and, in Mara’s final attempt at breaking through Chaffee’s mental roadblock, a sort of tangerine-and-saffron glow of her entire skull, lend the movie a few bits of fright that look the part but equally fail to terrorize. The intellectual ‘to and fro’ between Chaffee and the children, Carpenter’s feeble attempt to interject some deep-seeded philosophizing into a story that does not require it, is woefully out of place, only to delay the children’s inevitable rejection of their human hosts, perceived as a threat that must be destroyed. And pitting the movies’ ‘Superman’ and ‘Luke Skywalker’ to do battle in humanity’s stead does not exactly enrich these prospects for humanity at large. Immediately following Village of the Damned’s critical and box office implosion, Carpenter’s reputation as the ‘go to’ for horror completely evaporated. Neither his disastrous sequel to Escape from New York (1981) - (1996’s Escape from L.A.), or 1998’s Vampires came anywhere near in reestablishing his supremacy. And what has followed since, 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, and, 2010’s The Ward has not managed to correct this rapid decline. So, where will the axe fall on reassessing John Carpenter’s ‘greatness’ in the annals of movie history? Only time will tell. It surely is not to be found here.

Village of the Damned gets a pretty deluxe treatment on Blu-ray via Shout! Factory. The results are unusually solid for Universal, a company not well-regarded for doing right by their vintage catalogue. Here, the 2.35:1 image, sourced from 35mm anamorphic theatrical prints, looks pretty astounding, although the main titles are mysteriously pillar-boxed, with horizontal black bars to the left and right, as well as top and bottom. Dating back to the movie’s release on LaserDisc, this has been ‘the norm’, although the DVD release looked pretty darn soft and muted by comparison. Mercifully, Shout!’s Blu-ray is razor-sharp, crystal clear, free of age-related artifacts, and sports a color palette that is rich and vibrant, with exceptionally nuanced contrast and excellent black levels. DNR has been applied to eradicate film grain, which is not a good thing, as it also tends to obscure finer details in medium and long shots. There also is something remiss about the 5.1 DTS audio mix. It hollows out the Universal fanfare preceding the feature, and distorts the initial score and sound effects during the opening sequence of the movie. Afterward, things improve and the overall sonic resonance of the track becomes more robust and satisfying. We also get a DTS 2.0 stereo, better to replicate the theatrical release and, marginally, to sound better during the aforementioned opener. Shout! packs 140 mins. of goodies to augment this dumb show – a 48-min. retrospective with participation from some of the cast and crew, including Carpenter, along with vintage interviews, junkets, a stills gallery and badly worn theatrical trailer. All in all, if you love this movie, you will be impressed with the extras. Bottom line: Carpenter’s Village of the Damned is a pretty pedestrian affair. More was expected here, and more’s the pity it fails to live up, either to our expectations, or even the creepy good time instilled in the original 1960 classic. The Blu is up to snuff. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

1

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

5