Versus: The Competitive Movie Review Podcast · J & J

Versus Mini Episode # 4 : Alien Invasions 1

·25 min·1 clip

The Thing traps a remote Antarctic station with an alien that can take any form.

Jamie and Jessica open with a mini episode about aliens trying to take over the world. They quickly divide the subject in two, deciding that some aliens are out for domination while others just want to eat everyone and keep moving. Signs gets the first stop. The conversation brings in M. Night Shyamalan, Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, and Abigail Breslin, then settles into the loose arguing the show does best. Puppet Masters comes up as another movie worth circling back to later. They keep steering toward the real center of the discussion, Village of the Damned. It is the 1960 version. Wolf Rilla directs George Sanders and Barbara Shelby in a black and white story based on John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. The setup is simple and unsettling. Everyone in Midwich, England passes out for four hours, and when they wake up, every woman of childbearing age is pregnant. The babies arrive fast. They are super blonde, very smart, deeply odd, and able to read minds, which makes the whole town problem feel colder the longer the hosts sit with it. The episode keeps asking what is going on. It also keeps circling the question of what can actually be done to stop these inhuman children once the mystery is out in the open. A 1995 remake gets airtime. Christopher Reeves and Christy Alley are named, and the newer version is treated as workable but clearly held back by budget and a TV-movie shine. The 1960 film feels truer to the book. Its setting in 1960 matters because the talk around unmarried mothers, affairs, and suspicion gives the story more pressure. A doctor figures out the pregnancies line up on the same day, which makes the whole thing feel less like gossip and more like a pattern. The show stays loose and funny throughout, with limericks for Neville waiting off to the side and the usual side-eye at plots that get weird very fast.

As heard by us

A focused mini-episode that turns alien takeover movies into a sharp run through the weird stuff.

The episode shifts into mini-episode mode and stays with alien takeover stories of the trying-to-take-over-the-world variety, starting with Signs before moving to Village of the Damned.

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Why you'd press play

Alien takeovers get weird fast once the pregnant-town angle shows up.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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