Wow, I can't believe the fiercely negative reviews this marvelously messed-up two-cent amateur oddity has elicited. You see, I honestly really dig this flick. I personally think this gloriously godawful regional Utah "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"-stealing drive-in sci-fi doozy deserves a place on your home video library shelf alongside the seminal "all it takes is ambition and enthusiasm to crank out a feature"-type backyard works of Bill Rebane and Don Dohler. Any hardcore cinematic schlockoholic's prayers are immediately answered and appeased in the enticingly crummy pre-credits prologue, which shows an annoying comic relief hillbilly hooch-hound who bears an uncanny resemblance to a taller, skinnier George "Buck" Flower having his remote woodland shack buzzed by a hilariously hokey-looking spaceship. The flimsy plot, as far as it goes, depicts a tiny hick hamlet being terrorized by evil extraterrestrial beings on Halloween night (boy, that's a novel premise ... NOT!), with the chief focus put on a goofy gaggle of funky "Phantasm"ish teenagers who discover the aliens' secret base in the bowels of your proverbial creepy old rundown abandoned house located in the middle of nowhere.
Peter Semelka's beautifully clueless direction dexterously covers all the so-hideously-wrong-it's-paradoxically-right bad film bases: an on-and-off meandering tempo, game, yet pathetic thesping from a conspicuously pumped community theater-style cast (in fact, several of the atrocious adolescent actors won roles in this picture after participating in a local radio contest!), dippy dialog ("This ain't no airport -- god danged airplanes!"), absolutely no intuitive grasp of style, pacing and carefully wrought narrative construction to speak of, terrifically primitive cinematography which makes exquisitely ugly use of scratched-all-to-unsightly-hell ratty 16mm film stock, incredibly vapid kid main characters (one's a fat dolt in a gorilla suit), astonishingly stupid would-be surprising plot twists, a sweetly monotonous hum'n'shiver synthesizer score, hissy sound quality, lame attempts at dopey humor, slipshod editing, fabulously phony alien creatures (complete with glowing red bug eyes, no less!), similarly rinky-dink Tonka toy miniatures, an unbelievably putrid disco ending credits theme song, one of those irritatingly irresolute "they're still out there" ominous non-endings, and a story that's so basic, elementary and connect-the-dots predictable that its very obviousness acquires an inexplicably alluring, albeit askew numb-skull appeal. A wondrously wretched example of "let's amass a thousand bucks, gather up a bunch of friends who'll work for peanuts, and make ourselves a bona-fide motion picture in a couple of weeks" dime-store dreck that's eminently worth of both rediscovery and possible cult status. I myself think it's without a doubt the shamefully unsung and ignored "Plan 9 of Outer Space" of the 70's.
Peter Semelka's beautifully clueless direction dexterously covers all the so-hideously-wrong-it's-paradoxically-right bad film bases: an on-and-off meandering tempo, game, yet pathetic thesping from a conspicuously pumped community theater-style cast (in fact, several of the atrocious adolescent actors won roles in this picture after participating in a local radio contest!), dippy dialog ("This ain't no airport -- god danged airplanes!"), absolutely no intuitive grasp of style, pacing and carefully wrought narrative construction to speak of, terrifically primitive cinematography which makes exquisitely ugly use of scratched-all-to-unsightly-hell ratty 16mm film stock, incredibly vapid kid main characters (one's a fat dolt in a gorilla suit), astonishingly stupid would-be surprising plot twists, a sweetly monotonous hum'n'shiver synthesizer score, hissy sound quality, lame attempts at dopey humor, slipshod editing, fabulously phony alien creatures (complete with glowing red bug eyes, no less!), similarly rinky-dink Tonka toy miniatures, an unbelievably putrid disco ending credits theme song, one of those irritatingly irresolute "they're still out there" ominous non-endings, and a story that's so basic, elementary and connect-the-dots predictable that its very obviousness acquires an inexplicably alluring, albeit askew numb-skull appeal. A wondrously wretched example of "let's amass a thousand bucks, gather up a bunch of friends who'll work for peanuts, and make ourselves a bona-fide motion picture in a couple of weeks" dime-store dreck that's eminently worth of both rediscovery and possible cult status. I myself think it's without a doubt the shamefully unsung and ignored "Plan 9 of Outer Space" of the 70's.