Home
Some concepts just aren't as scary as they used to be. In VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (Universal, R), John Carpenter's remake of the 1960 sci-fi chiller, a group of small-town women give birth to emotionless, telepathic demon children -- scowling zombie brats with matching platinum-white hair. (They might be the unholy offspring of Mr. Spock and Peter Graves.) In the '60s, the notion of children as coldly intellectual superbeings -- kids as miniature evil adults -- had a prophetic resonance. The original Village of the Damned was like a Twilight Zone projection of the anxieties swirling around a new generation of space-age whiz kids. But that was before the dawning of such monster-child events as The Exorcist, The Omen, and Macaulay Culkin. When the children in Carpenter's Village flash their glowing eyes, hypnotizing the hapless grown-ups into committing a series of increasingly lurid suicides, the kids don't seem much more bizarre -- or frightening -- than your average 10-year-old Nintendo freak. C-
