The second screen adaptation, thirty-five years later, of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, retaining the title of the earlier British one. Though it loses something by being uprooted from tranquil postwar England, this is a story that can stand to be retold: the alien litter of robotic blond Master Racists bred in the wombs of earthlings. (Even better, it could stand to be read in its original form. Wyndham is possibly the most sheerly readable author of science fiction anywhere this side of Wells.) John Carpenter's superior production values and superior special effects do not ensure a superior movie, though. In glorious color, the children's blond hair (actually platinum hair) and hypnotic eyes (glowing alternately green and red, like traffic lights) come across rather cruder than in the black-and-white predecessor. Christopher Reeve, giving his usual hundred percent as against George Sanders's thirty or forty, is one definite area of improvement. Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Mark Hamill. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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