Wednesday, July 27, 2005

On second thought, the kids are definitely not all right: "Village of the Damned"

You know how those uber-polite, well-dressed, super-quiet kids seem a little too perfect sometimes? It turns out they're just waiting to take over the world. Who knew?

That's sort of the premise of "Village of the Damned," which I recorded from TCM and knocked out rather quickly, thanks to its 77-minute running time. But there was plenty of suspense even at that length, and this movie turned out to be a nice little thriller that will make you think twice about brushing off snobby British school children.

For an older movie (1960), Village gets off to an intriguing start, with an entire town full of people suddenly falling unconscious, as if a cloud of knockout gas descended on the area. They eventually come to, but within weeks every woman who is able to have a baby finds herself pregnant. This raises a few eyebrows, from the teenage virgin to the woman whose husband was away on some kind of boat. Oopsie!

These women all give birth to blond kids who seem pretty advanced for their age, and then start growing at a startling rate. Of course, the kids start hanging around each other, with their blank faces and identical outfits making them the most boring street gang ever. Oh, and it turns out they can control things with their mind, to the point that some townspeople won't be going to these kids' graduations.

While it's British and in black and white, "Village" wasn't boring, moving briskly from that opening scene to the strange pregnancies to the weird alien/demon children revealing their powers. I definitely wondered where this was going and who was going to bite it along the way, and this is without any CGI or gross-out effects, too. Instead of, say, Drew Barrymore setting people on fire, you just had these kids flashing their radioactive eyes at people. You know, a few drops of Visine will clear that right up, little fella ...

1 Comments:

At 1:17 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Man, you are just churning out the reviews lately. Not much going on in western charlotte I suppose.

 

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