Wednesday, November 24, 2004

 

A chance gone begging

Last night, I devoted a couple of hours of my life to watching Village of the damned. Not the 1960s original, but the 1995 John Carpenter remake.

To summarise the story (based on The Midwich cuckoos by John Wyndham), there is a mysterious blackout in a small village, everyone collapses, and when they wake up all the women are pregnant. 9 months later, all the women have scarily aryan-looking identikit babies who have strange and sinister powers, and a lot of the local people start meeting with nasty accidents.

My favourite part of the movie is when one woman's baby scalds itself on the hot soup that she gives it, so the baby uses its telepathic powers to make her put her arm in a pot of boiling water as payback for putting good food in front of it, the pint-sized ingrate.

Let me tell you: if some Nazi-looking telepathic baby ever tried to pull that crap on me, I'd smash its head in with a golf club and tell social services that it fell down the stairs.

Anyway, after this, the children dominate the villagers with their terrifying abilities and live together in the barn on the hill, where they read encyclopedias and indulge in similar Communism. Fortunately, the evil children's Achilles heel turns out to be their vulnerability to a suitcase full of dynamite.

This film was mediocre, but it could have been awesome, for two reasons: Luke Skywalker and Superman.


YES!


Mark Hamill and the late Christopher Reeve were cast in this film. HOWEVER, instead of being Skywalker and Superman, repectively, which would have been ace, they were a village minister and a doctor, in which capacity they sucked.


Noooo! John Carpenter, what the hell were you thinking?


A pitiful waste, but no matter: I hereby announce my intention to cast aside all of my other half-assed projects and get started on a remake of the remake of Village of the damned, in which aliens knock out and inseminate the villagers of Smallville, while Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter crash-lands in a nearby field, leaving him stranded on Earth.

I'd like to see the little so-and-sos trying out their alien mind control on a Jedi Master. Let's reprise that earlier scene with Skywalker instead of the baby's mother...

The baby's eyes start glowing as it wills Skywalker to put his head in the oven and turn on the gas. Not only does Skywalker block the psychic attack, but in retaliation he makes the baby soil its nappy and ignores its crying for the next 45 minutes while he does some cleaning up around the kitchen.

Excellent. Now all I need is a plot twist that will get the Transformers and the X-men involved as well.

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