Format: DVD from Lasalle Public Library through interlibrary loan on the new portable.
Of the horror directors whose surame start with C, John Carpenter clearly has the highest highs. I love Wes Craven dearly, but it’s hard to compete with The Thing and Halloween. Carpenter probably has the lowest lows, though, as films like Ghosts of Mars and Escape from L.A. will attest. His 1995 remake of Village of the Damned (sometimes referred to with his name before the title as John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned) falls between those two extremes. Sad to say, it’s very much on the lower end. Village of the Damned was certainly due for an update (and probably is again), but this wasn’t the update that was needed, fleshed out from the original as it is. The hope that Carpenter could find lightening in a bottle a second time with a remake was unwarranted, sadly.
As it happens, this is also the final theatrical release featuring Christopher Reeve before the accident that left him paralyzed. Reeve struggled a bit with typecasting after his stint as the Man of Steel, so this movie may well have been a further effort on his part to step away from that image.
