Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The Galaxy Invader

This 1985 cheapie is the epitome of cheap films. It desperately steals anything it can from more expensive and, well, better movies. Let's just stop for a second and analyze the opening credits.
The credits are in the exact same font and colour as the very first teaser line from Star Wars ("A long time ago in a galaxy far, far way...."). The credits fly away from the camera in a way that remind the viewer of the opening credits of 1978's Superman, albeit in a very cheap way. Underneath it all is a cheap John Carpenter-esque synth score, all the rage in the mid-1980s. (In fact, this is composer Norman Noplock's only film score.) Writer-director Don Dohler made about a dozen low-budget low-brow films in his career, and this is one of his early films.
An alien has crash landed his spaceship and it was witnessed by a teenager, who phones his old science teacher. As the science teacher rushes to the scene, the alien breaks into a house and attacks the occupants.
In the morning, at another house, Daddy the Drunk Redneck decides it's high time he killed his daughter so he chases her through the woods with a shotgun. He comes across the alien and shoots him. The wounded alien drops a giant marble, and Daddy thinks it might be some sort of alien artifact and worth something.
Science Teacher eventually arrives to investigate. (He drives an Avanti -- how many science teachers could afford one of those?)
Meanwhile, Daddy the Drunk and his Dumb Redneck Son call in a bunch of Drunk Redneck Buddies to go alien hunting. All they end up shooting is the Science Teacher. Surprisingly, none of them shoot each other.
The special effects, the acting, the direction, the camera work, the script -- it's as all as bad as one would expect, and in most cases it's laughingly bad. There's actually a couple of funny lines in the script, and the basic idea of rednecks hunting an alien could have produced a little gem of a movie, but the production is so amateurish and inept that nothing gets set up properly for there to be any sort of payoff. The climax of the film, when Long Suffering Wife has finally had enough of Daddy the Drunk has to be seen to be believed. And I don't mean that in a good way.

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