The original "Village of the Damned" was a taut, lean black-and-white story of some telepathic alien kids growing up in an English village, causing grief and anxiety before being collectively extinguished by their professor, the only person in the village whom they needed.<br /><br />This film, 35 years later, sticks more or less to the same narrative path, based as it is on the novel and the earlier screenplay, but is louder, splashier, and gorier. It's not nearly as original or powerful as the first version.<br /><br />I'll just give one example of what I mean. Almost at the very beginning of the 1960 film, we see the professor (George Sanders) drop unconscious to the floor while speaking on the phone. Wolf Rilla, the director, cuts to other gray village sites and shows us bodies sprawled in awkward positions on the ground, the floor, the furniture. A bath runs over. An iron burns a shirt. There is no musical score, no sound but running water from the bath. We get the complete picture. Everyone and every thing is knocked out cold, and the spell lasts for an hour or two.<br /><br />In this version John Carpenter, the director, gives us a livelier opening in full color, presenting the cast of characters, which is an okay choice, but when the spell descends on the small town and scenes show us unconscious bodies all over the place, the visuals are accompanied by an irritating assemblage of electronic noises that, one supposes, are designed to be "eerie" or "spooky" but simply don't compare to the matter-of-fact but ominous silence of the original. And here, too, a bath runs over. But instead of a shirt burning, a man burns. Another man, struck unconscious while driving, has his pickup roll off the road and collide with an object. Does the truck explode in a fireball? Are you kidding? This sense of the endlessly conventional, of excess run amok, continues throughout the movie. The original was not a profound work but it did raise some interesting issues, illustrating them without directly addressing them. Here, the issues are spelled out in pompous speeches -- "You are not HUMAN if you don't feel emotion!" Of the performances, I could only credit Linda Kozlovsky's and Chris Reeve's. The others are either forgettable or, worse, unforgettable. (The kids all speak with a lisp.) The original was not aimed at a highbrow audience or even an especially adult sensibility but it succeeded in reaching everyone. This one aims lower and flunks. Nice location shooting, though. The comedian Mort Sahl used to joke that the residents of Marin County were always trying to get the toll raised on the Golden Gate Bridge to keep out the riff-raff.