Garbage remake of a classic film replaces subtlety, originality, and intelligence with in-your-face shock violence. This is especially sad knowing this film came from a director I admire a great deal, John Carpenter. He was running out of steam in the 90's and it shows here. Gone is the smart script, tense direction, and memorable performances of the first film. Here you have a movie with a significantly larger budget made 30 years later and it fails to capture any of the chilling effectiveness of the original. The children are not spooky. They wear bad wigs and do not grip you with a sense of uneasiness the way they did in the other film. Even if you try to remove comparisons between the films and judge this on its own merits, it's still a weak effort that fails on most levels. Recommended only for Carpenter completists and those who like their horror dumbed-down.
Review of Village of the Damned
