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Children of the Damned (1964)

Rate: 8
Viewed: 5/25

ChildDamn
5/25: Too many questions kept popping into my head while watching Village of the Damned, but I had almost none during Children of the Damned as it eventually answered what I had been asking all along, "What is the motive?"

Afterwards, I started to wonder if it was more of a remake or a sequel. In a way, Children of the Damned feels like the former with Gordon Zellaby being split into two, Tom Lewellyn and David Neville, to create a philosophical battle with the same ending. Should the alien children be kept alive for further study or destroyed because they're perhaps too dangerous to mankind? Then, there's the mention of a similar phenomena all over the world in the original, and the sequel has them coming together in one place after they've grown up some more.

What helps a great deal is the stylish black-and-white photography to inject noir into this sci-fi thriller. For a while, the show did feel dull because all I got was stares, but it got much better in the final forty-five minutes by getting right down to the bottom of the mystery. Speaking of sci-fi, Children of the Damned isn't horror by any means; these alien children only killed out of self-defense after perceiving they were about to be harmed. That's the scary thought behind it; what's their ulterior goal after all? We'll never know.

Anyway, the performances are well-done. This is the only film out of three, which includes the remake by John Carpenter, that actually has diversity by having a black boy, a Chinese girl, and an Indian boy among the alien children. Seeing a few similarities, I thought of The Omen, and it was smart of everybody to have them placed in a church to show they weren't part of Satan's design. By the way, you can pat yourself on the back for noticing a picture of Mahatma Gandhi because the guy who wrote the script was John Briley, and he went on to win the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Gandhi.

All in all, it's better to forget Village of the Damned ever existed and just focus solely on Children of the Damned.