Live Life Team
Genre: Horror
Director: Wolf Rilla
Starring Cast: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Laurence Naismith, John Phillips
All the residents of the English village of Midwitch briefly pass out at the same time and for the same duration. Sometime later it’s discovered all the women capable of bearing children are pregnant. Stranger still, when the children are born they all possess an eerie physical resemblance and age unusually quickly.
One of the best and last entries to the 1950’s era paranoid horror/sci-fi series, Village of the Damned (remade unsuccessfully in 1995 by fallen Horror king John Carpenter), is a wonderfully crisp and subtle example of British cinema. The use of children is a chillingly effective device, particularly when they’re totally devoid of emotion as they are here. Almost identical, they act as if they’re component parts of one larger entity, eventually leading the kindly school teacher, Gordon Zellaby (Sanders) to believe they might be. Sanders is superb, his touching serenade to wife Anthea (Shelley) is both a career highlight and wonderfully touching moment. Sadly his career came to a premature end twelve years later when he committed suicide through “boredom”.
The cinematography of Geoffrey Faithful is beautiful throughout, and director Wolf Rilla keeps everything moving along at a brisk pace (the movie is only 77 minutes long). The result is a modest, but highly watchable little horror classic.
