Search
Village of the Damned (1995)
6.2
Rate It
Movie
Ten months after the small California town of Midwich was struck by a mysterious event during which...
The Quiet Woman
Book
THE QUIET WOMAN stitches together a horrifyingly plausable near-future dystopian Britain and a...
John Wyndham's final novel revisits a number of his themes and has the odd good passage, but you can tell the author has struggled with it. A group of idealists looking to create a perfect society discover they have made a bad choice of site: the location in question, a remote Pacific island, is already overrun by vast swarms of social spiders - possibly the result of nuclear testing in the region (or, failing that, a curse from the original islanders, displaced by the colonial powers).
Sounds like it has promise, but it takes a very long time to properly get going (the spiders don't appear until the second half of the book) and it's a bit unclear what points Wyndham is trying to make. Some of the divergences from the classic Wyndham formula are a little curious; the protagonist is older, and the general tone more fatalistic than in his better-known books. Fairly readable, but it lacks the big ideas and memorable imagery of his best novels.
Sounds like it has promise, but it takes a very long time to properly get going (the spiders don't appear until the second half of the book) and it's a bit unclear what points Wyndham is trying to make. Some of the divergences from the classic Wyndham formula are a little curious; the protagonist is older, and the general tone more fatalistic than in his better-known books. Fairly readable, but it lacks the big ideas and memorable imagery of his best novels.
Awix (3310 KP) rated Village of the Damned (1995) in Movies
Nov 16, 2019
Thumpingly unsubtle SF remake turns up the horror dial but doesn't seem aware that sometimes less is more. After a strange town-wide blackout, the citizens of Midwich (do they really have 'villages' in Northern California, anyway?) discover ten women have simultaneously become pregnant. They give birth to eerily similar children who seem to have psychic powers.
Released in 1995, this is very much The Midwich Cuckoos for the X Files generation, but ends up just another signpost marking the decline of John Carpenter as a film-maker worth paying attention to. The sad thing is that he really does seem familiar with both the original British film and the source novel (elements of the book missing from the 1960 film reappear here) and is obviously trying to do his best to honour them, but where John Wyndham is chillingly subtle and understated, John Carpenter is just walloping the audience with a succession of predictable set-piece 'shocks'. Reasonable CGI but overall it looks cheap and unconvincing; some reasonable performances from an interesting cast, but there's a limit to what they can do with such a duff script.
Released in 1995, this is very much The Midwich Cuckoos for the X Files generation, but ends up just another signpost marking the decline of John Carpenter as a film-maker worth paying attention to. The sad thing is that he really does seem familiar with both the original British film and the source novel (elements of the book missing from the 1960 film reappear here) and is obviously trying to do his best to honour them, but where John Wyndham is chillingly subtle and understated, John Carpenter is just walloping the audience with a succession of predictable set-piece 'shocks'. Reasonable CGI but overall it looks cheap and unconvincing; some reasonable performances from an interesting cast, but there's a limit to what they can do with such a duff script.
The final novel published in John Wyndham's lifetime is something of a return to form, offering a very different and understated take on the theme of first contact with alien life. The Gores are an utterly ordinary middle-class family until twelve-year-old Matthew acquires what seems to be a very strange imaginary friend - Chocky, who keeps asking all kinds of strange questions about life on Earth. As Chocky's influence over Matthew grows, vested terrestrial interests take an interest in this strange situation...
The thing that makes Chocky work so well - the overwhelming ordinariness of most of the characters and settings, contrasted with the always-at-a-remove alien presence of Chocky - is also the thing that will probably pose the biggest barrier for modern audiences. Wyndham was writing SF that would be acceptable to mainstream sixties readers, and his dry, reserved, conventional narrative voice may have done the job back then, but it feels rather dated now. Nevertheless this is a strong story, very capably told, touching upon some interesting ideas about communication with a truly alien intelligence. Not quite like anything else I've ever read; possibly a minor classic.
The thing that makes Chocky work so well - the overwhelming ordinariness of most of the characters and settings, contrasted with the always-at-a-remove alien presence of Chocky - is also the thing that will probably pose the biggest barrier for modern audiences. Wyndham was writing SF that would be acceptable to mainstream sixties readers, and his dry, reserved, conventional narrative voice may have done the job back then, but it feels rather dated now. Nevertheless this is a strong story, very capably told, touching upon some interesting ideas about communication with a truly alien intelligence. Not quite like anything else I've ever read; possibly a minor classic.