VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Universal, 1995) Shout!/Scream Factory

The last movie Christopher Reeve committed to before suffering his hellacious riding accident, 1995’s remake of Village of the Damned, is also a bittersweet farewell for its director, John Carpenter who, having inculcated a reputation as a roadshow ‘Hitchcock’ with masterful forays into horror throughout the late 1970’s and early 80’s, steadily watched as this Teflon-coated reputation eroded in the 90’s. Indeed, by 1995, Carpenter was best regarded in the industry for his cult status, and regrettably acknowledged for a spate of recent screen failures. 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 1960 movie, how could any remake of Village of the Damned miss?

In Carpenter’s case – far too easily. The fault herein, arguably, was not Carpenter’s but Universal Studio’s eleventh-hour decision to prune the picture’s 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, the movie they made, and, the one eventually to hit theaters bore little earthly resemblance to each other. And while Carpenter has professed his satisfaction with 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 was made, vowed to resurrect the terrors of yore, interested in delivering a more faithful adaptation of the original novel.

Owing to financial entrenchment, this project never materialized, though it 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 de facto go-to to helm the remake of Village of the Damned.  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. Too bad, Carpenter disliked the original screenplay by David Himmelstein so much he 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. 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. Regrettably – no – and, mostly for the reason, virtually all of the aforementioned star power came with their own built-in public personalities, 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. However, when the picture premiered, the general consensus was Carpenter hadn’t gone far enough. I will concur with that assessment. Apart from flashes of carnage, tastefully photographed to mitigate the gruesomeness, while inferring more to follow, Carpenter’s desire to return to the roots of horror – sans gore – resulted in a ‘scary flick’ with very few legitimate ‘scares’ on tap.

Fair 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. Arguably, wigs would have sufficed as the dye caused some of the kiddies’ actual hair to fall out. Even so, ‘order’ rather than ‘chaos’ reigned supreme on Carpenter’s set. Cast and crew drew on a deep admiration for their 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 employed to achieve their glowing eyes. In the 1960 movie, shot in B&W, the children’s ominous 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 emanating from their diabolical minds. 

As with Wolf Rilla’s original, Carpenter’s reboot opens with an ominous preamble depicting the small Southern California 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 a cue - a much too-too ‘on the nose’ underscore co-authored by him and Dave Davies.

However, whereas the 1960 Village of the Damned steadily emerged from this auspicious opener as a superb thriller to ply the 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 mask what should otherwise best remain unseen. This is the biggest misfire Carpenter makes – a slavish desire to return to hallowed horror lore of yore, without first considering what terrorized us in 1960 has since made us blasé and numb for all but the more potent shocks that revile. In retrospect, Carpenter’s movie is not as much a reboot as a regurgitation, with a few intermittent, and arguably, needless complications thrown in, disposable and gratuitous, and, never to surpass the original, even from the vantage of our more jaded times. 

As in the novel, and, original movie, the town of Midwich is mysteriously cast into a collective ‘blackout’ from which all 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, 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.  Melanie’s child is delivered stillborn and is quickly whisked away to a secret location by Dr. Verner. The surviving nine offspring are deemed healthy, but bare an uncanny likeness to each other, sporting albino skin, blonde 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 mates, 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 human compassion, thus, considered by his cohort as an outcast. Isolating themselves in a barn on the outskirts of town, the alien children begin to acquire 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 compelled to set herself afire with a torch, Father George plots to assassinate this motley brood. Instead, he is forced under the children’s collective mind control to turn his rifle on 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. While Mara and the others concentrate their psychic powers to break through Chaffee’s mental roadblock, Jill rescues David 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, suggesting to David they will go ‘somewhere’ where nobody knows about their past.

Carpenter’s remake of Village of the Damned is a colossally sloppy, lost opportunity to reestablish his supremacy as the master of horror. Almost from the outset, the picture is incapable of generating anything more than slight unease. Too much of what is here is predictable to a fault, and lacking Carpenter’s originality. Top-billed 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 and unprepossessing. Alley’s Verner floats in and out of the Himmelstein/Carpenter narrative like a slightly malignant scientist. Is she genuinely interested in the children? Or is she merely out to gratify her ego? 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, under the children’s mind control, predictably turn on each other in a horrendous bloodbath. It all makes for a penultimately bloody scene. But by then, an impenetrable ennui has 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 the bare essentials in character development, a definite plot, proper establishment of the passage of time, and, worst of all, the ominous and palpable pall of dread and danger to make it memorable. Instead, mediocrity reigns, plunging us 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 implied Carpenter was on the cusp of regaining lost artistic ground in the horror genre. But this suspicion became utterly deflated with the theatrical release of Village of the Damned. Rilla’s 1960 classic crams so much 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. Mara’s final attempt to break through Chaffee’s mental block adds a sort of tangerine-and-saffron glow to her entire skull. But the intellectual ‘to and fro’ between Chaffee and the children, and, Carpenter’s feeble attempt to interject some deep-seeded philosophizing into a tale that does not require it, is woefully out of place, delaying the childrens’ 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 either. Immediately following Village of the Damned’s critical and box office implosion (it barely made $9 million on a $22 million budget), Carpenter’s reputation as a horror-meister completely evaporated. Neither his disastrous sequel to Escape from New York (1981) - (1996’s Escape from L.A.), nor 1998’s Vampires came anywhere near to reestablishing his supremacy. And what has followed since, 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, and, 2010’s The Ward has not corrected 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. But it surely is not to be found here.

Shout!/Scream Factory reissues Village of the Damned in 4K. But is it an improvement? Well…yes. Sort, of. For starters, the picture’s been remastered in 4K off an original camera negative. Not sure what Shout!’s earlier Blu was derived from, except to say it lacked something, and also, had a weirdly window-boxed main title sequence. This has been corrected. So, the entire feature is now in its native anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Colors deepen, background detail advances, contrast is slightly darker, and film grain – at long last – appears indigenous to its source instead of looking gritty or, at times, digitally scrubbed. The new 4K does retains a hint of edge enhancement. It’s just a hint. But it’s there. Aside: not sure why this can’t be fixed. Flesh tones advance. On Blu-ray they leaned toward piggy pink. The 4K illustrates a more refined texture and tonality. The 5.1 DTS audio sounds different too. The Blu’s 5.1 hollowed out the Universal fanfare and distorted the initial score and sound effects during the opening sequences. The 4K’s 5.1, by comparison, sounds utterly solid from the outset and remains effectively mastered throughout. Shorn from this release, the theatrical 2.0 stereo.  

Shout! packs the 4K with 140-mins. of goodies, starting with a new commentary from filmmakers, Jackson Stewart and Francis Galluppi. There is also, two separate interviews, the first with screenwriter, David Himmelstein, the second with music historian, Daniel Schweiger. Ported over from the Blu – the same documentary on the making of the movie, It Takes A Village – featuring comprehensive interviews with cast and crew, an episode of Horror’s Hallowed Grounds, a reflection piece on Carpenter by Peter Jason, vintage interviews with cast and crew, an image gallery, and, theatrical trailer. Bottom line: 4K is great. But it cannot transform sow’s ears into silk purses. Carpenter’s Village of the Damned remains a pedestrian affair. More was expected here, and more’s the pity it never happened. The 4K advances in all regards and should be considered the ‘go to’ for fans of this flop. Judge and buy accordingly.

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

1

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

5