If you thought hospital births were a bit impersonal wait until you get a load of village of the damned. This movie has a birth scene where 8 woman give birth simultaneously! Remember MASH? Replace the screaming, wounded soldiers with women in labour and you’ll get the picture.

Village Of The Damned Weird Kids

This version of village of the damned is John Carpenter’s 1995 remake. To be honest it’s not that good. The only thing I got out of it was the wacky birth scene, and even that’s a lowlight rather than a highlight.

So, one sunny afternoon the village of Midwich experiences a strange phenomenon – every living thing inside its boundaries drops unconscious for several hours. Nobody has an explanation, but some months later the local doctor notices they’re in the midst of a pregnancy epidemic! This causes a bit of an uproar as one of the women was a virgin and another wasn’t having sex with her (now suspicious) husband.

Fast forward a further few months and all the women give birth to their babies. Uncannily they all look alike and as they grow older develop bizarre rituals like coordinated dressing and marching like soldiers. Some of the locals are getting suspicious. They’ve noticed the children’s telepathic powers and their ability to possess people using their illuminating eyes. This usually results in the interfering local’s grizzly suicide rather than the owner of the sweetshop handing out free mars bars.

So yes you guessed it, the children are really emotionless aliens that were implanted into surrogate mothers and are now on a mission to take over world.

But What About The Birth Scene

As you may know, obstetric scheduling has optimized the 9 month birth phenomenon. You WILL give birth EXACTLY 9 months after conception. The authorities had been tipped off so were well prepared for the impending birth orgy by converting a local barn into a makeshift hospital. Inside clinical cubicles have been set-up, each equipped with a bed and plenty of machines that go ping.  An obstetric production line is underway, ironically not that dissimilar to a real hospital.

The scene is a fairly typical movie birth, woman on her back, lots of screaming and instructions to push. In fact, I think this birth scene may hold the PUSH! world record. Anyone care to count?  Oh, and Mark Hamill is in it and we know he was an absurd birth, so no wonder this one is not much better.

Is there anything positive in the scene you must be wondering. Um… Well at least when the babies are born they are immediately placed on to their mother’s chest.

It’s implied that one of the babies is a stillbirth and it’s quickly whisked away by a government doctor who is at the centre of the investigation. But did she isolate it on purpose so she could perform an autopsy on it? Who knows? Not the coroner for sure!!

The Midwich Cuckoos

The movie is based on John Wyndam’s story The Midwich Cuckoos. The cuckoo refers to the surrogacy but the village name of Midwich is interesting. Midwich as in birth and midwife? Midwich as in midwives are witches? I wonder why he chose that name?

In the book there are 31 births instead of the movie’s 8. What a cop out. Can you imagine how crazy that would have been?

Related posts:

1. Absurd Birth Scenes – Look Who’s Talking
2. Absurd Birth Scenes – Parenthood
3. Absurd Birth Scenes – Rosemary’s Baby
4. Absurd Birth Scenes – She’s Having A Baby
5. Absurd Birth Scenes – Grace