THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 4, 1995 TAG: 9505040018
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, MOVIE CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
THE KILLER who looks most innocent is the one who shakes us up the most when he pulls a knife. Put a child in that role and it almost always works.
It almost works, again, in ``Village of the Damned,'' John Carpenter's remake of the 1960 British thriller that throws a pack of alien children at us. Anyone who has seen that black-and-white flick remembers its claustrophobic, paranoid chill.
The mood is not helped by Carpenter's broad style or his Technicolor technology. The children now stare with beamed eyeballs that switch from red to lavender, but they are not nearly as scary.
The film begins with a rather effective scene. A shadow, obviously a spaceship, hovers over a California town. The residents are zapped into some six hours of sleep. When they snap out of it, all the women are pregnant.
Things go wrong one scene later when Carpenter allows the births to be treated comically. All the wives have the babies at the same time and rush en masse to the hospital.
The cast is a group of almost-unemployed familiar faces, who prove distracting. Mark Hamill is a long way from ``Star Wars'' as the town minister. Meredith Salenger, whom everyone thought looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor in ``The Journey of Natty Gann,'' has a bit part as a troubled teen. Michael Pare, of ``Eddie and the Cruisers,'' is alive only briefly. Linda Kozlowski, wife of Crocodile Dundee, is a widow who gives birth to an alien child.
They all appear briefly and are not developed as characters.
Working hardest is Christopher Reeve as the town doctor. After trying to teach the children human emotion, he eventually must make a dreadful decision - to eliminate them. Reeve, the former Superman, approaches this with the intensity he might bring to Hamlet.
Most distracting of all is Kirstie Alley as a chain-smoking expert who wears tailored suits. Her comedy background (mostly in ``Cheers'') gets in the way, and we never can take her seriously. Her past wouldn't have mattered if she had actually been given a new identity here.
The original film came along at a time the world was worrying about the international threat of communism. It was condemned by the Catholic church because of the impersonal impregnation. The British censors banned it because the kids' eyes were too horrific.
No such attention is likely for this short-ish remake. Carpenter, who filmed in the same town he used for the disastrous ``The Fog,'' seems more interested in colored lights, and eyes, than in mood.
Karen Kahn, as the lead child, is genuinely threatening. The modern message seems to be unfeeling violence as the children persuade the adults to kill or harm themselves.
Perhaps because of the familiarity with the original, the film has too many laughs and not enough scares. The children, bleached to the roots, look more like the children of Jean Harlow than the children of the damned. This tame version might be called village of the darned. ILLUSTRATION: UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Nine children with supernatural powers wreak havoc on the tiny
coastal town of Midwich in ``Village of the Damned.''
Graphic
MOVIE REVIEW
``Village of the Damned''
Cast: Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Michael
Pare, Mark Hamill, Meredith Salenger
Director: John Carpenter
Screenplay: David Himmelstein, based on the novel ``The Midwich
Cuckoos'' by John Wyndham and the 1960 screenplay
MPAA rating: R (Those eyes cause scalding water damage, and
worse. Its R rating is just)
Mal's rating: two and 1/2 stars
Locations: Chesapeake Square in Chesapeake; Janaf, Main Gate in
Norfolk; Columbus, Kemps River, Lynnhaven 8 in Viginia Beach
by CNB