John Carpenter's Films - Ranked From Worst To Best

17. Village Of The Damned (1995)

Pros * The children are (admittedly) rather creepy * Christopher Reeve is surprisingly good in it * Faithful remake of the 1960 original Cons * Not as creepy or as good as the original * Unnecessary gore and violence * Disjointed narrative flow

Overall: Carpenter again tries his hand at remaking a film but this time the results are far less impressive than they were with The Thing.

Village of the Damned is an oddly anachronistic film - it may have been filmed and set in the mid-90s but it certainly feels like a film of the fifties, and not in a good way. There is no attempt to update the source material and, instead, the film comes across as a poor man's version of the 1960 original.

Critics were unimpressed and the film bombed at the box-office, grossing a poor $9 million (domestic) against a $22 million budget. It's unsettling in places, sure, but that's just not enough to redeem it, unfortunately.