Movie review - "Village of the Damned" (1960) ***

So very highly regarded by fans I found it a little disappointing - not the story, which is superb, more the treatment, which is occasionally silly: the over acting kids (the main one is funny rather than scary), hammy villagers, lack handing, telepathic-induced accidents causing a laugh. George Sanders isn't bad as the intellectual who is one of the victims of Midwich, initially delighted to discover his wife is pregnant then slowly coming to realise that the kids are evil. I think it means more to people who saw it on TV when they were young.

Some touches I always remembered and loved from the book are missing: the little old lady who becomes pregnant and is later convinced she can tell the kids apart, at the end when the kids are excited about Sanders coming around before he blows them up (I think they did this to make our hero more sympathetic). It's a shame because there are a lot of these sort of touches at the beginning - ones on the impact on the whole community (e.g. virgins and married women whose husbands are away falling pregnant) - but they are increasingly discarded as the movie goes on in favour of the kids being creepy.

Barbara Shelley is good playing one of her I-see-to-be-classy-but-in-actual-fact-I'm-a-seething-mass-of-neuroses roles (only here the neuroses are about being a mother rather than wanting to have sex with some evil man/vampire). Michael Gwynn plays the part of a skinny middle aged man with a good speaking voice - there was always someone like that in a British film around this time.