Village of the Damned

John Carpenter's film that most resembles a Stephen King story (which is no coincidence considering King's Under the Dome book which has an opening almost identical to this film), VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is a totally weirdo film that is vitally weird. It opens with an introduction of the village people, typically (of Carpenter) intrusive and wonderfully direct. Thus, by the time a citywide epidemic that puts everyone to sleep for hours and impregnates a dozen or so of the town's women comes about, who everyone in town is and how they're going to react, is perfectly justified and sensible. Cynically-arrived government officials headed by Kirstie Alley's Dr. Susan Verner guide the townspeople through the sudden pregnancies, which all of the women go through with after consulting with their husbands, and ending with a tent of crying, screeching women giving birth as they clutch the hands of their husbands. Carpenter has an astounding flair for setting up townspeople as real people, and its a moving moment to watch a usually publicly paraded about event that ends in the private act of giving birth as a private act of quasi-rape ending in a publicly paraded about mass-birthing. Soon after the children become cognizant beings though, terrible things start to happen, and Alan Chaffee (Christopher Reeve), the town doctor and our protagonist in the film, experiences the horror himself when his wife jumps off a cliff near their house. The children grow up into hyper-intelligent, feared look-alikes with platinum hair and dialogue that feels like they've come from another planet, even though A. They have and B. They still grew up around "regular" humans. But the children become a weird force in the town, coming to be known as people who are not to be trifled with (even by their parents). The rejection of this known evil essentially destroys the entire town and everyone in it, horrifically, with only a few who escape absolute destruction. It's a minor Carpenter film with some flaws, but it's a pretty good film because it commits to its vision of evil as something burgeoning out of a communal township, and ending in their eradication.

3/5 Stars