Alien Trespass

Alien Trespass

Alien Trespass is a genuine try to make a film that feels like one of those 1950s B movies where a monster from outer space terrorizes a town in the desert. In the desert, because if you went east from Hollywood, that’s where you were, and if you went west, you were making a pirate picture. Alien Trespass is in color, which was unusual for any other thing of this style in the 1950s but it’s otherwise an informed version of the look and feel of those pictures about things with jaws and tentacles and claws and weapons that shot sparks and eyes that shot laser beams at people, only they weren’t known as laser beams but as Deadly Rays.

Up against them are plucky locals, dressed in work clothes from Sears, standing behind their open car doors and looking up to meet awkward special effects that are coming coming! this way! Alien Trespass doesn’t bend over backward to be “bad.” It tries to be the best bad movie it can be. A lot of its deliberate badness has to do with effects some viewers might not notice.

For instance: bad back projection in shots looking back from the dashboard at people in the front seat. In the 1950s, before CGI, the car never left the sound stage; and in the rear window they projected footage of what it was allegedly driving past. Since people were presumed not to study the rear window intently, they got away with murder. A decade earlier, in Casablanca (1942), Rick and Ilsa drove from the Champs-Elysees to the countryside instantaneously.

The plot: Astronomer Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack) and his sexpot wife Lana (Jody Thompson) are grilling cow sized steaks on their backyard barbecue when something shoots overhead and crashes into yonder mountains. The sexpot wife is an accurate touch: The monster genre usually cast pinups like Mamie Van Doren and Cleo Moore, who were featured on the poster with Deadly Rays shooting down their cleavage.

Ted goes to investigate. When he returns, his body has been taken over by Urp, an alien. Urp means well. He needs help in finding another alien who arrived on the same flying saucer. It’s named the Ghota, which has one eye, enough for it to qualify as a BEM, or a Bug-Eyed Monster.

The Ghota eats people in order to grow, divide and conquer. Sort of like B.O.B. in “Monster vs. Aliens,” which is also a send-up of 1950s BEM movies (so far, Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002) is the only movie ever made in tribute to a great movie of the 1950s).

The Ghota is battled by Urp and his plucky new buddy Tammy (Jenni Baird), a local waitress who is a lot more game than Lana. As nearly as I can recall, in the 1950s good girls were never named Lana and bad ones were never named Tammy; there are also hapless but earnest local cops (Robert Patrick and Dan Lauria), and an assortment of threatened townspeople; also great shots of the Lewis family home, separated from the desert by a white picket fence, surrounded by the age-old story of the shifting whispering sands

Alien Trespass, directed by R.W. Goodwin (TV’s “The X-Files”) from a script by Steven Fisher, is obviously a labor of love. But why? Is there an unmet demand for bad 1950s-style science fiction movies? Will younger viewers consider it merely inept, and not intentionally inept? This is a film that belongs at Comicon or the World Science Fiction Convention, not your neighborhood multiplex.

If you need to see a science-fiction movie about a menace from outer space right now, there is one I think is great: “Knowing.” If you want to see a really bad science fiction movie about a threat, etc., most of the nation’s critics seem to believe this one qualifies. How can you lose? From beyond the stars a mysterious force strikes terror into the hearts of men!

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