Village of the Damned features a cast of actors better left on the shelf, all of them somehow famous, but with the major * of essentially being famous for one thing.
- Clark Kent is Superman.
- Kirstie Alley was the chick from Cheers.
- Mark Hamill is Luke Fucking Skywalker for Force’s sake!
- Linda Kozlowski was the chick from Crocodile Dundee (the film I had to imdb to find her name).
Believe it or not the one that fares best in the face of this execrable drivel is Kirstie Alley. (Actually looking at the four names I would’ve believed it even before watching this.)
The other name on the poster – and of course in the title – is that of one Mr John Carpenter. If anyone should suffer for having created this it is him.
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An evil ‘shushy’ sounding shadow knocks out the entire population – including cows – of a small town named Midwich, knocking up the entire adult female population in the progress.
The result of this simultaneous impregnation, all delivered on the same day, could most favourably be described as ‘tainted’, though most accurately ‘pointless’.
There is no confirmation of any evil blond calves being born on that day… pity, that might’ve been a better film.
“Mum look. They’re doing it again!”
The kids grow at an incredible rate under the watchful eyes of government employees headed by Kirstie Alley. The kids age years in months, with mental capacities far more advanced than their peers, or indeed the writers of this script. They are all blond haired and blue-eyed, with pasty skin. And the ability to compel others to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily agree to. Sounds like the American Dream to me – or a college girl’s volleyball team.
My only wish is that they turned to me sooner and compelled me to turn this crap off.
Everyone immediately recognises that these kids are not your normal run of the mill tykes – they were fathered by a whispering shadow for fuck’s sakes – but still no-one says much, even when the 7 practically identical kids troop about wearing old people’s grey clothes and talking like dispassionate and decidedly un-kidlike dicks – something they are not supposed to do until they hit their teens.
We then get an hour of the kids spouting inane, supposedly ominous dialogue, a towns full of morons slowly twigging to the truth that was there since the beginning, and countless scenes of the Fisher Price Master Race imps standing and staring with crappy CGI altered glowing eyes while a hapless actor pretends to be unable to do things that they don’t want to do.
Suffice to say that by the end of the film my eyes were similarly glazed over, and by watching this film I too know the pain of doing something I really didn’t want to do.
Village of the Damned is so bland and lifeless that it doesn’t really warrant my hatred, which is perhaps why I hate it so.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. If this all sounds very ‘whatever’ to you let me just say you’re spot on. It remains amazing to me that John Carpenter, the director who made Halloween, The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, was somehow responsible for this mess.
