1983 - STRANGE INVADERS. possible spoof of 50's science fiction films

First let's get the plot out of the way.  In the late 1950's, space aliens show up and take over a small Midwestern town.  They possess the bodies of the people living there for some nefarious purpose.  Jump ahead about 20 years later and a college professor played by Paul Le Mat in an incredible piece of miscasting, shows up in the town,  He is almost incinerated by these space aliens.  The film involves Le Mat and Nancy Allen, playing a reporter for a National Inquirer type of newspaper, returning to the town to save Le Mat's daughter.  She has been kidnapped by the space aliens because she is half human/half alien.  I'm not even going to get into how this contrived subplot developed.

Strange Invaders slavishly follows the formula for 1950's science fiction films particularly Invasion of the Body Snatchers and It Came From Outer Space two films that are a lot better than this mess. This film can't decide if it wants to be a parody or a straightforward recreation of those films.  In either case it fails.  I can't understand what the intentions of the writers and director were and I doubt they had a clear idea themselves.  I'm all for a parody of those old films but again what is the point if you don't have something to say besides "look how clever we are duplicating those old films."

The director Michael Laughlin stages every scene so flatly that it's almost like watching middle school kids make a movie with a video camera which in a way is an insult to middle school filmmakers. The film appears to be deliberately photographed with a piece of gaze or something over the camera lens to give it a 1950's look but all it gave me was a headache.  The composer John Addison was clearly told to write an over the top film score but his loud screechy music just make my headache worse.

 

Probably the best thing about the film are the supporting players, Kenneth Tobey, Charles Lane, June Lockhart, Wallace Shawn (?) and Michael Lerner.  It's a great group of actors but the director doesn't seem to know what to do with them which is unfortunate.  Strange Invaders is a complete failure.

Written by Michael Laughlin, Bill Condon and Walter Halsey Davis.  The running time is 94 minutes.