Village of the Damned (1960)

At only 77 minutes, this film would be pretty easy to rewatch right away with commentary, as I did once with another. Naturally, it gets coupled on DVD with its spiritual successor (not a sequel proper) Children of the Damned. But I decided that neither of those follow-ups was likely to be as entertaining -- and my time would be better spent writing this review.

In the beginning, everyone within the village of Midwich, England, falls unconscious for about four hours. Afterward, every Midwich woman of childbearing age is...well, they couldn't use an adjective for it on screen at the time. The offspring look human, albeit with subtly unusual and samey traits, but their mental and physical developments are rapid. Their emotional development, not so much. And they exhibit the telepathy for an essential hive mind -- not as much as Professor X, but enough to make them very hard to oppose.

Prof. Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders), the "father" of the kid David (Martin Stephens), wishes to study them for science and hopes to instill common virtues in them. Others, both within the village and among military authorities, have less optimism. There comes a philosophical conundrum: At what point is it right to imprison, let alone kill, mysteriously powerful children? Surely you don't want to follow the brutal example of those Soviets in a similar position....

Yeah, the title is a bit of a stretch, but I can see how it would sell better than that of the book on which it's pretty closely based: The Midwich Cuckoos, in reference to the common cuckoo practice of putting eggs in other species' nests. The movie does not imply as heavily as the book that the children are alien in origin; they might be mere mutants as in CotD. If they are aliens, it has implications for the moral course to deal with them. I couldn't help thinking of the low-emotion aliens from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, especially as the kids get more open about their differences as they gain control. At best, they're not malicious, just a little overly defensive (they never harm anyone who appears to pose no threat), but it's likely their plans go beyond little colonies spreading across the UK.

If you've seen the Simpsons episode "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken," showing less than a minute of a fictitious feature called The Bloodening, then you already know the gist of what these kids are like. But while TB is of course played for laughs, VotD isn't so easy to laugh off. Viewers still get the chills from those eyes in freeze frames. Furthermore, Stephens, who understandably gets the most dialog among the kids, had his own remarkably articulate voice dubbed in, making him seem all the more unreal. Even the cheaper elements do nothing to cheapen the effect.

Early on, I was put off with the whole impregnation scenario. Those poor women must have felt basically raped. Some of them welcomed the news at first but then worried about abnormalities; others were implicitly accused of adultery or underage fornication and, I suppose, lies about their sexual status. (The perverse variation on virgin birth led to delays in the making of this film; otherwise, Ronald Colman would have played Gordon before he died.) All gave birth to babies upwards of ten pounds, and I'm sure they all came to have trouble loving children who never loved them back. I suspect that the John Carpenter remake suffered in part from addressing the issue more directly than the Hays Publication Code would allow.

VotD is not my idea of a tour de force of fear. Mainly, it's perturbing. But it is interestingly done, and it won't take too much of your time.