Thursday, April 12, 2012

Film Review: Village of the Damned (1995)

1995?  Really?

Wow.  I kept looking at Kristie Alley and Christopher Reeve and saying to myself, "I didn't realize they looked so old and decrepit in the mid 80's...and how did Kristie Alley get so much better looking when she was on Cheers those years later?"

Turns out, my mind was thinking, due to the cheezy effects and film making that this film HAD to have been done in the early to mid-80s but I was off by at least a decade.  Alley is in this film two years AFTER Cheers ended and this was likely her career highlight in that period (if a highlight it can be called).  Reeves is about as wooden and plastic as a Superman doll and this also was one of his highlights.  Why anyone liked Reeve is beyond me.  He sucked in Superman and was a disaster in anything else he touched. 

Even Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is included here looking bloated, scarred and overwrought as ever.

While I like some of John Carpenter's films, this is not one of them.  The whole thing is "silly" and not in a good way.  Where the $22,000,000 budget for this film went I don't know but it certainly didn't go into production value, special effects or reshoots.

The story itself leaves a lot to be desired--sorry but psychic, white haired children intent on the death of their parents and community just doesn't raise the hackles on the back of my neck, nor it seems anyone else as the film was a commercial flop.  There is no real horror here, no real fright.  Just a weak story, weak acting and weak directing from a filmmaker that has as many peaks and valleys to his career as Rocky Mountain National Park.

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