EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS (aka POD PEOPLE)

As a lifelong (aka since 1988) fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I have a lot of love for EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS, better known by its US distribution title POD PEOPLE. Episode 303 is unarguably one of the finest MST3K episodes ever produced. It was the perfect pairing of bad movie with sharp witted comedians. But as the years rolled on, I began to wonder...

Outside of the Godzilla and Gamera films (and a smattering of others), I had never seen a single film used by the MST3K crew outside of the show. Can I really say that I've seen EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS if the only way I've seen it is in an edited, compressed version with people talking over it? Can I really say that I've seen THE UNEARTHLY, MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE or CITY LIMITS? I suppose I can. I know plenty of people who will claim to have read certain books when in reality they only listened to the audio book. Is there really that much of a difference? 

So I decided today that I would spend 80 minutes of my life watching EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS without the accompaniment of Joel and the Bots. I would try to push the jokes I know by heart out of my mind. I would give it, for what it's worth, an honest chance. How did that work out for me? Well…

EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is all about a family and a pop music group under assault by a murderous alien after three poachers destroy the recently crashed alien's egg nest. The only surviving egg ends up in the hands of the family's young son (and budding entomologist), Tommy. The egg eventually hatches and Tommy begins a friendship with the young alien, a curious and relatively harmless little chap Tommy names Trumpy (he looks like ALF with a snout). But Trumpy's mother (or father or whatever) is roaming the forest, obliterating the cast with surprising efficiency, all in search for her (or his or whatever) offspring. How will Tommy's family react when they find out he's been sheltering a potentially dangerous animal? And moreover, who will survive and what will be left of them?

I closed out that paragraph with a quote from the theatrical poster for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Why did I do that? Because I wanted to mention, if only for a sentence, a good horror movie. That way, this review won't be completely negative. Because EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is NOT a good horror movie. I know, right? I can't believe it either!

That isn't to say that the film is uninteresting. Had I said that, I would be lying. But the reason the film is interesting has nothing to do with the quality of the material on display. It has to do with the fact that EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is a Frankenstein film. Not literally, mind you, but figuratively. The film was directed by Juan Piquer Simon, a Spanish filmmaker who was, up until this films release in 1983, best known for his double dose of nastiness, SEA DEVILS and PIECES, the latter being one of the finest bits of over-the-top slasher film action ever made. EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS began life as a cheapo sci-fi/horror film about an alien running amok in the woods, only to be forcibly transformed into a more family friendly picture when Spielberg's E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL made a killing at the box office.

You can see the seams everywhere you look. What child would sympathize or identify with our pop music group? They're characters clearly meant to be body count fodder and a few seemed to have been hired for their willingness to wear skimpy outfits and disrobe for the camera. But because this is now a family film, the skimpy clothing becomes blouses and blue jeans in a matter of scenes, and the sole shower scene is nudity free. The aliens rack up quite the body count as the film goes along. But because this is now a family film, all those murder scenes are bloodless. I swear, you can actually hear Juan Piquer Simon audibly gritting his teeth as Tommy's grandfather is casually killed by a slap to the belly by one of the aliens, a scene which probably ended in a gory disembowelment before the studio heads decided to neuter the whole film.

Another casualty of the studio decision was the aliens themselves. I can't imagine Simon was thinking of furry, long nosed creatures, which look a bit like someone hollowed out a plush toy and then stuck a child inside of it before sewing it back up, when he started working on the film. But as this was now a family friendly film, I suppose the sight of Tommy cavorting with some kind of giant, drooling arachnid-looking beast wouldn't have appealed to the kiddies all that much. So Trumpy and his mother (or father or whatever) became non-intimidating, cute little beasties with glowing eyes and the ability to make a room full of junk dance around in the air. The overall adorableness of the monsters kills all suspense and terror before it can even start.

So what then are we left with? Well, not much. We have a cast full of nondescript characters that don't do an awful lot, a duo of villains that threaten a chick with rape before being quickly shown the door, and a whole lot of day-for-night photography rendered even more laughable by the overuse of fog machines. There's also a handful of original, though horrible, ditties that play on the soundtrack (I'm sure you know the words to one of them already, don't you?) and some wholly unconvincing special effects detailing the crash landing of the aliens and their various telekinetic powers.

It's shit, really. But it is pretty far from being intolerable shit. Trumpy the Alien has more personality than Trumpy the 45^th President of the United States. The cast contains the always likable Ian Sera and some lovely ladies. The bad dub job lends the film some unintentional hilarity (and at least Tommy sounds like a child, unlike Bob from THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY). But let's be honest, the version featured on MST3K was a helluva lot better, not only because of the hilarious commentary, but because it cut out a decent amount of the films padding. There are long stretches of nothing to be found in EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS and they make an otherwise brief and steadily paced turd feel like its taking forever to hit the water.

So in summary, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is still best viewed as Episode 303. Sure, you'll miss out on some profanity (f-bombs in a family friendly film, eh?) and some bickering between the protagonists, but you won't have to make up your own jokes as the film goes along. Win-win, really.

BLOOD AND LACE

Philip Gilbert's 1971 shocker BLOOD AND LACE feels downright prophetic in many ways, anticipating the later breed of cynical exploitation roughies like THE CANDY SNATCHERS and PETS while also prefiguring the slasher films that would come around near the end of the decade. It begins with the familiar face that launched a thousand slasher films, the POV murder set piece. Here we see an unknown killer bludgeon a middle aged prostitute and her John to death with the claw end of a hammer, all before setting the house ablaze. Luckily, the prostitute's daughter, gorgeous 17-year old Ellie, survives the ordeal unharmed.

As she is still considered a minor, Ellie finds herself a ward of the state and is sent to an orphanage run by the domineering Mrs. Deere. Little does Ellie know, her stay at the orphanage isn't going to be a pleasant one. We've already witnessed Mrs. Deere's right hand man, Tom, chase a young man through the woods. The chase ends when Tom cuts the boy's hand off with a cleaver, leaving him to bleed to death in the bushes. This is just how things work at Mrs. Deere's place. First offense, you get slapped around a bit. A second offense might end with you being tied to a pole in the attic and left to starve to death. Trying to run away… well, we know how that ends, don't we? Mrs. Deere can't allow children to run off, can she? That would hurt her bottom line. After all, every kid she takes in comes with a nice stipend from the state.

But Ellie's first few days at the orphanage aren't that bad. She meets a few of the other kids, like Pete, a wormy chump who is always trying to steal food. She is given a roommate, a slightly younger girl named Bunch (seriously). And then there's Walter… Oh, dreamy, dreamy Walter.

Ellie also has a friend of sorts in Detective Carruthers, the man investigating her mother's death. But I'm not too sure Carruthers is the kind of friend Ellie needs. Maybe it's the way he looks at her or the way he describes her as “good breeding stock”. Truth be told, there might not be a single person Ellie is safe to be around. We already know that Tom is a killer, but Mrs. Deere is showing instabilities of her own. She sometimes creeps into the basement to have conversations with someone unseen. Worse, Ellie begins to see a man standing above her bed at night, his face charred, a hammer clutched in his hand. As the walls slowly close in around her, is there anything Ellie can do to escape this nightmare? Or is she destined to end up like all those missing “runaways”, slowly rotting inside Mrs. Deere's meat freezer?

BLOOD AND LACE is probably best described as “comfortable”. I know that might sound like an odd way to describe a movie that contains murder, implied pedophilia, attempted rape and child abuse, but the attitude of the film is far more unoffensive than you might think. Sure, it's sardonic and confrontational at times, but the film somehow manages to skirt around the potential offensiveness of its subject matter by being effortlessly charming and not forgetting its sense of humor along the way. Despite some narrative and thematic similarities, it lacks the cruelness of films like HOUSE OF WHIPCORD and though the violence on display is sometimes graphic, the film doesn't wallow in its bloodshed. It's a good Saturday afternoon kind of horror film, the kind you watch when you want some thrills and chills, but don't want your day ruined by being reminded that the world is a toilet in desperate need of flushing.

The film is good looking with a swift and steady pace, doling out new developments and fresh shocks every ten minutes or so. The casting is absolute perfection. We have Gloria Grahame (of OKLAHOMA and THE BIG HEAT fame), Len Lesser (good ol' Uncle Leo from Seinfeld), Vic Tayback (Mel on the great sitcom Alice), a young Dennis Christopher (probably best known by horror fans as adult Eddie in IT) and most importantly, the lovely Melody Patterson (who looks a bit like a prototype of Naomi Watts) as Ellie. Put simply, these people have personality and as Sam Jackson once said, personality carries great distances. The entire cast is full of life, just a parade of great faces and voices. Even if you're finding the story of BLOOD AND LACE a bit underwhelming, chances are the performances by this first class batch of character actors are going to pull you through.

And there's a damn good chance you WILL be underwhelmed by the story at times. BLOOD AND LACE is all too familiar and some of its shocks have been rendered somewhat moot by decades and decades of higher profile films that played many of the same games. You're likely to guess the identity of the killer from the first scene (even if you'll probably never see the second and third twists of the ending coming) and because of the age of the film, it never commits to either of its two closest sub genres. Had the film been made three or four years later, it would have tumbled down the hole of crass sexploitation, a hole it spends a full half of a film digging. Had it been made around 1979 or so, it would have descended into full blown slasher territory. I can imagine some people growing frustrated with this films commitment issues.

BUT

Personally, I find the lack of a clear identity to be one of the films strengths. I like that the film sometimes meanders a bit thematically before ratcheting up the sleaze and intrigue. I like that the slasher elements only creep into the film once the trap surrounding our heroine has been set. When the man with the hammer makes his first appearance, it's already too late for Ellie to make a move. Stay or leave, chances are she will end up dead either way. With decades and decades of horror and exploitation films still fresh in memory, the undeveloped land BLOOD AND LACE inhabits comes complete with not quite recognizable back alleys and boulevards. The film doesn't need to work to subvert your expectations. It just needs to do its thing. We, the audience, are the people with historical hindsight and we, the audience, are the ones expecting the film to behave according to rules that no one had written yet. So when BLOOD AND LACE takes a sharp right, it sometimes feels counter intuitive. It's that element of the film that I enjoy the most. It's like taking a new path to a familiar place. You may end up where you always end up, but the way the trip plays out feels wonderfully different.