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| (yes, apparently they did this intentionally. I don't know who thought that looked acceptable.) |
Village of the Damned
(1995)
Dir. John Carpenter
Written by David
Himmelstein,
Starring Christopher
Reeve, Thomas Dekker, Lindsey Haun, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Michael
Paré, and Meredith Salenger, but who gives a shit about any of them, because it
also features Mark fucking Hamill as “Reverend George.” That’s right,
you got a John Carpenter movie with God Damn Luke Skywalker in it. And you
haven’t even seen it, you lazy, worthless ingrate. I bet you’ve seen at least
one of those idiot JJ Abrams STAR TREK movies and yet you’ve never even
considered watching this mid-career offering from one of the genre’s
acknowledged masters, even though it stars fucking Mark Hamill. You’re
everything that’s wrong with the world, and it’s time you admitted that.
Another day, another entry into our ever-growing How Could It Not Be Great? canon. Holy shit, you think, John Carpenter, just a year after the
underrated IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, adapting a novel by the great mid-century
sci-fi author John Wyndham (which had already been adapted into something of a
minor classic in 1960), with a decent budget and a solid cast, how could this
not be… Oh, who am I kidding? You know exactly how this could not be great.
Let’s face it, remaking the 1960 British sci-fi/horror staple VILLAGE OF THE
DAMNED in 1995 was a bad idea from the get-go. The original was deeply and
inseparably a product of its time, drawing its charm from a fragile mix of Cold
War anxiety, mild 60’s British transgressiveness, and stagey (and in
retrospect, more than a little campy) but earnest black-and-white dreamy
matinee creeps.
I am a writer by
avocation, but as a writer about film, I concede to the medium the broad axiom
that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” So consider these three shots to be
the 3,000 or so words it would take me to properly articulate what the 1960
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is all about:
I mean, those three
shots tell you everything you need to know about it, good and bad. On one hand,
there’s no getting around the fact that the little blond kids with glowing eyes
and slack faces are corny as hell. They’re meant to look alien and uncanny, of
course, but the effect is just so artificial and oversold that it’s hard to
take it seriously. On the other hand, the black and white film combined with
the pervading stagey and artificial quality of 50’s British genre cinema (which
this resembles much more than the Hammer-influenced gothic horror explosion of
the 60s) also allows the film to neatly sidestep realism and offer the viewer
at least the option of meeting the film’s signature iconography on its
own terms. Most genre fiction, after all, requires a certain suspension of
disbelief, and in their own native milieu, I think even the glowing-eye
towheads of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED are a functional object, of sorts.
But let me ask you this,
what if we did the same thing in 1995 in glorious COLOR?
So yeah, this was never going to be a good idea, and, it
should be noted, even Carpenter himself wasn’t too enthused about the project.
As he succinctly put it in a 2011 interview, “I’m really not passionate
about Village of the Damned. I was getting rid of a contractual assignment.”
Which is fair enough, I guess. I mean, a job’s a job, and those Lakers tickets
don’t pay for themselves.
The end result of that contractual assignment is a film
which is hardly in danger of being mistaken for a passion project. It’s
entirely competent -- nothing here suggests the bizarrely misjudged boondoggle
of GHOSTS OF MARS, only six years and two films away -- but it categorically
resists rising to any kind of high point that would give us a clue as to what
someone thought the point was supposed to be. In fact, the plot hews so closely
to the original film that the script by David Himmelstein (a baffling, sparse
resume of four writing credits between 1986-1996, ranging from the Edward James
Olmos sports flick TALENT FOR THE GAMES to Sidney Lumet’s POWER) is credited as
an adaptation of the 1960 screenplay, rather than an adaptation of the 1957
Wyndham novel. It adds a few little details here and there (including a few
touches of gore that seem wildly out of place), but never enough to give any
indication why someone thought this was worth remaking. The eye effects, I
guess? 30 years of special effects progress has finally made it possible to
tell this story the way it was meant to be told… with the same light up
eyes now in COLOR.
Yes, you heard that right. COLOR.
Anyway, the plot is
basically identical to the 1960 version: one day, out of the blue, every living
creature in and around the small California town of Midwich suddenly falls
asleep, wherever they are. Anyone entering the area immediately suffers the
same fate. In six hours, they all awaken, except the ones who were driving, or
tightrope walking, or juggling chainsaws or whatever. Or, in one agreeably gruesome case, standing over a grill. But mostly the citizens just wake up and
go back to their lives, a little unsure what happened. Unsure, that is, until a
few months later, when local doctor Chaffee (Christopher Reeve, in his final
role before an accident left him paralyzed) starts to realize that ten of the town’s women
(including virginal Melanie Roberts, [Meredith Salenger, LAKE PLACID]) seem to
have been impregnated during the “blackout.” And when the kids are born, it
quickly becomes clear that they are some kind of psychic, super-intelligent
hivemind with matching Debbie Harry Sisqo Eminem Machine
Gun Kelly hair and lite-brite eyes. And also that they’re evil.
This last detail is made
clear surprisingly early on, probably the most significant alteration the 1995
script makes. The 1960 version plays out slowly, spending much of its runtime
examining the townsfolks’ strained, confused reaction to this inexplicable
phenomenon and never showing the children doing anything unambiguously hostile
until over 50 minutes into a 77 minute runtime. Here, there’s no doubt; right
from the cradle, these kids are causing mayhem, and pretty much everyone knows
it. On one hand, that was probably the only way to approach this material in
1995; how tedious would it have been to drag it out and try to pretend the
audience doesn’t already know that the creepy little kids with the glowing eyes
are the bad guys? But on the other hand, the entire conflict of the original
film is based on the adults’ wrestling with their uncertainty about what the
kids are, what they want, and what to do with them. Here, all those questions
are answered almost immediately, but the movie doesn’t really pose any
alternate conflict to replace the one it kills off. The two movies proceed
almost identically --even featuring nearly parallel scenes-- except that,
having resolved the central conflict which the 1960 version uses to fuel nearly
its entire plot within the first 20 minutes, the 1995 version finds it has
nowhere to go, and just kind of sits there spinning its wheels, reinforcing the
point over and over that yep, these kids sure are evil, all right. None of it
is bad per se, but it sure is narratively inert, and it really makes you
feel that runtime. Anything under two hours is hardly a difficult ask in this
age where people routinely watch through entire seasons of TV in a single
night, but it’s worth noting that the 1960 version leisurely works through its
storyline in a slim 77 minutes, while Carpenter’s version has arguably less
plot to work through, and still runs a full 22 minutes longer.
Part of that longer
running time --a small part, but a notable one-- is devoted to a smattering of
stepiece kill scenes, which was surely part of the marketing calculous of
bringing Carpenter into the remake. The original has a relatively low body
count --I recall only three victims-- but was certainly not above taking a sadistic pleasure in milking them for morbid thrills. The remake keeps
all three deaths intact, and adds a few more of its own, including a
nasty self-vivisection and a surprisingly huge gun battle (in the original, the
townsfolk consider calling in the military, but dismiss the idea upon realizing
the kids would just use their mind control to make the soldiers shoot each
other. The remake, of course, is understandably curious as to what that would look
like). As with revealing the kid’s malicious intentions early, this makes sense
on the surface, and might in itself have been enough to justify a remake,
if they had really committed to that approach. A pivot from Twilight Zone eeriness
to giddy splatter would be weird, but would certainly embody a fresh approach
to the material, made possible only in the intervening 35 years.
Alas, then, that 1995’s
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED doesn’t really do that. There’s certainly more explicit
gore than the original, but not nearly enough to give the film a reason for
being, or clearly locate it in a particular mode of horror. It’s appreciated,
but it’s not enough to justify the clash in tones which inevitably results when
you throw five or six gimmicky death scenes into a screenplay essentially
written in 1960. These are two distinct flavors of horror which do not
mesh together comfortably at all. Haphazardly stitching one into the other blurs the film’s focus and heightens the sense of
filmmakers trying to hedge their bets by throwing different things at the
audience to see what sticks, instead of committing to one clear vision.
That same scatterbrained
sense of good ideas indifferently applied carries over into the film’s themes,
too. In the “Production Notes” on the DVD, Reeve reflects, “When they made [the
original] in 1960, the evil alien, if you will, was Communism. This was the
threat, the disease that could overtake this healthy American organism of
liberty and democracy. With the demise of the Cold War, we don’t have that
threat any more. But we have something else -- the indifference to violence.
And the message in this film is the banality of violence, of evil. Death has no
consequence, and metaphorically, we see that here as a kind of infection, which certainly exists in our culture today.”
Maybe so, which helps to
elucidate the decision to portray the kids as blatantly evil right from the
start, and to have pretty much everyone aware of that fact. It’s definitely no
longer a metaphor for a subversion or invasion. But I’m less convinced the
story lends itself well to the idea that it’s about indifference to violence. I
mean, it is about that, I guess, in the sense that the parents spend so
much time begging the kids to feel human emotion and empathy (a point touched
upon in the original, but which is insisted upon here). But it’s not
much of a metaphor since the aliens were just zapped onto Earth, and there’s no
evidence they could be convinced to do anything other than murder us all, and
our only hope is to kill them before they use their telepathic powers to have
us all commit suicide. So what exactly is the message here? “Don’t be a
ultra-powerful psychic sociopath?” OK. I’m not convinced it’s exactly an
immaculate metaphor for creeping Communist menace either, but at least in 1960s
England that threat was understood to come from outside, as an invading
force. Carpenter certainly knows that indifference to violence isn’t some alien
feeling being forced on humanity, it’s an impulse that comes from within us, as
old as civilization, and so representing it with these invading others who
are completely alien and incomprehensible to us just doesn’t really work.
Consequently, the movie offers but doesn’t really commit to this reading,
allowing it, like the setpiece kill scenes, to melt inconsequentially into its
aimless wandering without providing any sense of direction.
Similarly, Carpenter
himself offers a gendered reading of the remake: “The original movie and the
novel were written from a masculine point of view. This was an opportunity to
explore the female aspect of the story and their reaction to the situation.”
I’ll grant the "female aspect of the story" could use some exploring; the 60’s version is so profoundly
disinterested in what the women think that it actually has its protagonist
patronizingly send his wife on vacation while he makes plans to (SPOILER) suicide
bomb their kid. And for a movie which condemns the little monsters for lack
of empathy, its curiosity about the human emotions evoked by this situation
barely extends beyond its mild irritation that emotional women make it hard to
think rationally about the problem. Even original director Wolf Rilla (CAIRO,
and what a name!) agreed that, “We made [our] film at a period when the old
male chauvinism was still very strong. John [Carpenter] has brought another
element into [his film], one of feminism, which is quite right. One discusses
these sorts of things more openly than we did in the 50’s and 60’s, when people
would be uptight about sex and anything to do with it.”
Seems like a good idea,
and there are definitely a bunch of women in the cast, but since none of
these characters are very interesting, and we learn very, very little about
what they’re thinking beyond the most basic platitudes, I don’t know that it
really adds much. Certainly calling it feminist in any sense seems hard
to defend. Maybe it would have been more shocking back in 1995 that the kids
have a female leader (Lindsey Haun, SHROOMS, far and away the most committed
and effective performance in the film), and there’s a cynical female doctor
(Kirstie Alley, STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KHAN and Operating Thetan Level 7)? A
quick survey of contemporary reviews doesn’t give that impression, but what the
hell, good thought, anyway.
Carpenter is also said in the DVD extras to
have added some theological rumination, but man, it’s just barely in
there. I mean, they say bible verses, I guess. But it’s a long way from
exploring the subject in any kind of meaningful way. After all, holy shit!,
aliens and telepathy and mind control! The very existence of these things has
enormous ramifications for our ideas about the soul, about morality, about
death, about humanity’s place in the universe. But all the movie offers is a
grim-looking Mark Hamill (JOHN CARPENTER’S BODY BAGS)
reading a prayer about children. Just another example of how the movie is not
lacking for content, but isn’t really ABOUT anything. It gives the impression
of a film where some thought was put into what to do, but little effort was put
into actually doing it.
Carpenter, even in the
same interview he admits to not caring much about the movie, does claim that,
“it has a very good performance from Christopher Reeve, so there’s some value
in it.” It’d be kind of petty to quibble with something like that, especially
given what happened to poor Reeve afterwords, but although there’s nothing
wrong with his acting, I can’t help but notice that he, like nearly everyone in
the film, is bizarrely miscast. It’s not his fault, really, it’s just that he
is simply not believable as a real human. Come on, nobody is that
ruggedly handsome, he looks like a cartoon prince who shows up at the end of a Disney
movie. The stupid kids in the Sisqo wigs look more convincing. And they are,
after all, kids -- pitting them against a literal superman is a damn
strange dynamic, and having everyone else in the movie try to pretend he’s just
some podunk country doctor and not some kind of adonis übermensch is
even weirder.
The rest of the cast is mostly a wash. Alley is also a
truly befuddling choice for a cynical, vaguely sinister government agent, but
it hardly matters because the role (which has only a tenuous parallel with the
1960 version) is vaguely written in the extreme, with the film unsure how to
posit a character who confusingly vacillates between callused villain and minor
second protagonist. And other than the A+ work from young Lindsey Haun as the
childrens’ leader and spokesman, nobody else in the cast gets much to do. Linda
Kozlowski and Meredith Salenger are both admirably committed to the single
character trait they’re assigned, but can’t do much more. Michael Paré vanishes
before he can leave an impression.
And then you’ve also got
Mark Hamill in there. He’s really trying hard, but unfortunately it’s not much
of a role, and it wouldn’t even really be worth mentioning at all except that
remember, he’s Mark Fucking Hamill, so the fact that he’s standing
around in the background of various scenes making us wish he was talking is kind
of distracting. He plays the town priest, “Reverend George,” in a role which must surely have been meant for an older character actor. In fact, in this
2015 interview he claims he was brought into the production late, after David Warner,
who originally had the part, dropped out. Warner would have been ideal for this
kind of thing (although you’d still be left with a character who isn’t really
given much to do), but Hamill, in 1995, was still too young and pretty to
intuitively read as a fire-and-brimstone small-town country priest, and doesn’t
have enough screen time to convince us with his acting. So it’s just weird.
The strange,
self-defeating casting choices are, in a way, a perfect microcosm of the movie
as a whole. They’re certainly interesting, and even give the impression
that someone, somewhere, was trying to do something, but aren’t nearly
effectively managed enough that you come away with a clear sense of what that
something might be. Even Carpenter’s score (this time co-written with Kinks’
guitarist Dave Davies[!]) seems a little less focused than usual, wandering
between unusually bombastic (but not especially memorable) marches and quiet
minimalism without much sense of purpose.
So in the end, I’m sorry
to have to report that John Carpenter’s VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is more
interesting curiosity than chilling horror classic. “I had much higher hopes.
The Wolf Rilla one is still the best,” Hamill would later judge. But still, it
is a John Carpenter movie (it has George “Buck” Flowers in it and
everything!), which alone is enough to demand your attention, and fuck, it’s
got goddamn Mark Hamill and Superman going head-to-head against a posse of
murderous alien telekinetic aryan Edgar Winter cosplayer children. Even if it
never quite comes together into the swift kick in the teeth that it should be,
you’d have to be a real asshole not to at least give it a try.
PS: Many reviews point
out that it was filmed at the same sites in Inverness and Point Reyes, CA,
which also appeared in THE FOG. They mention this as though it’s just
interesting trivia, and not hard scientific evidence that Inverness and Point
Reyes, CA, are some kind of filmmaking Kryptonite for John Carpenter.
CHAINSAWNUKAH
2018 CHECKLIST!
Searching For Bloody
Pictures
TAGLINE
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Beware The Children. So even the tagline is hardly trying.
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TITLE ACCURACY
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Has a pretty 1960s
flavor to it, but I guess it’s better than the novel’s title, The Midwich
Cuckoos
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LITERARY ADAPTATION?
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Yes, from the 1957
novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
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SEQUEL?
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None, although the
1960 version has a sequel called CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED from 1964.
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REMAKE?
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Yes
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COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
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USA
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HORROR SUB-GENRE
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Bad Seed, Psychic
killer, Aliens
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SLUMMING A-LISTER?
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Christopher Reeves,
Mark Hamill, Kirstie Alley (I guess?)
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BELOVED HORROR ICON?
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John Carpenter
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NUDITY?
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None
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SEXUAL ASSAULT?
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Women impregnated
against their will, but it seems to be through some kind of outer space
energy ray or something.
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WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
|
In the original, I
remember the dog growls at the evil little kids, though I don’t specifically
remember that happening here.
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GHOST/ ZOMBIE /
HAUNTED BUILDING?
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None
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POSSESSION?
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Yes, via mind-whammy
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CREEPY DOLLS?
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None
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EVIL CULT?
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None
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MADNESS?
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No
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TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
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None
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VOYEURISM?
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None
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MORAL OF THE STORY
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COMMUNISTS ARE
INFILTRATING OUR CHILDREN AND WE MUST KILL THEM!!!
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