#AtoZChallenge: Alien Invasions

It's time for the start of the A to Z Challenge!  This year I'm doing it on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax episodes.  If you don't know what that is, look it up or read my topic reveal post from March.

As the title of Mystery Science Theater 3000 would imply, there were plenty of sci-fi movies.  A lot of them were from the 50s because those were cheap but especially on Rifftrax there were newer ones from the 80s and 90s.

Alien From LA:  This was one of my favorites from MST3K in the early 90s.  It was also one of the first ones after Michael J Nelson took over the hosting duties.  The movie was actually pretty new, from the late 80s but because it was made by the defunct Cannon Films it was probably pretty cheap to obtain.

Anyway, the movie starred supermodel Kathy Ireland as a waitress who follows her archaeologist father to Egypt after he disappears.  She winds up falling underground into a strange world that's populated by human-ish things like a guy with lashes across his whole eyes or a lady with a hairy eyepatch.  The cleverness of the title is that she's the alien in this world and she's from LA.  Get it?

With the help of a vaguely Australian-sounding guy and some other guy she finds her father and escapes back to the surface world while the evil empire underground tells everyone, "Nothing to see here."  Like most Cannon pictures it's made on the cheap; in a DVD extra the director talked about how they went to Africa to film it because it was cheap.

One of the intermission sketches was pretty hilarious as the robots quizzed Mike on all the expressions of Kathy Ireland.  They were all the same:  dull surprise.  They could probably revise that game for Kristen Stewart in those Twilight movies.

Alien Outlaw:  This was a goofy 80s sci-fi movie featured on Rifftrax.  It involves aliens who crash in North Carolina and hassle a woman who performs gun shows like a modern Annie Oakley and a few locals including the elderly Lash LaRue.  Though most of the movie involves the woman firing her lazy manager at a small motel that for some reason has a bellboy, yokels fishing, and a horse called "Mr. Stud" that runs away to a local gas station.

The aliens look like white trash cousins of the Borg and for some reason they don't have any ray guns or anything like that.  Instead they steal the human woman's guns to use.  One of them is stopped when a fish hook detaches an air hose or something.  It really makes you wonder how the hell they managed to travel across the galaxy.

The grand finale involves the woman shooting a damp piece of dynamite that explodes like a 500-lb bomb, which is pretty improbable.  But then so is the whole movie.  It is pretty fun to watch though.

Galaxy Invader:  It's basically a country cousin of Alien Outlaw.  An alien ship crashes in a Southern town.  Only this is less wacky and more unpleasant.  The alien is found by the patriarch of a family who slaps his daughter, chases her around with a shotgun, and generally acts like an asshole.  Along with his dopey son and a local big shot they plan to sell the alien and/or his ray gun to the highest bidder.  But things don't go as they planned and mayhem ensues.

It's not as much fun as Alien Outlaw but just as cheaply made with no real acting talent or anything and pretty crappy effects.

Star Games:  I talked about this in an entry last year.  It's basically one of the worst movies I've seen.  It's cheaply made and annoying and the plot makes no goddamned sense.  While it was made in the late 90s it features effects like claymation that looks like it's from the 50s and computer effects left over from Tron.  Director Greydon Clarke cast his own kids in the lead roles and it shows as they're both about as talented as their father.  Tony Curtis cashed a paycheck as the grandpa to the one kid who's an alien prince trying to avoid an evil alien who wants to take over the universe or some goddamned thing.

But watching the Rifftrax is pretty fun as this movie is just so, so bad that it lends itself to making fun of just about everything about it.

Starship Invasions:  The same year as Star Wars, Christopher Lee starred in this crappy sci-fi movie where he wore a black body stocking with a snake painted on it and communicated telepathically with his minions.  His planet was dying so he thought he'd take over Earth.  But there's some kind of Federation that is headquartered underwater.  So there are terrible battles in the air and space and then some random robot saves the day.  Hooray?  Instead of an epic story of good vs evil you had sort of a minor skirmish.  Instead of George Lucas ILM effects you had ships on string.  Instead of a John Williams score you had crappy Scooby-Doo music.  Instead of R2D2 and C3PO you had crummy looking junk robots.  Otherwise, exactly the same.

Contamination:  An Italian-German ripoff of Alien, though it never actually leaves Earth and takes place in present day, which was 1980.  A boat comes into New York loaded with green "eggs" that when heated explode goo all over.  The goo then causes people it touches to explode.  I guess that way it wasn't exactly like the famous John Hurt scene in Alien.  A female Defense Department person, a police lieutenant, and an astronaut who went to Mars and reported seeing green eggs, which caused him to become a drunken laughingstock, go to Colombia or somewhere like that to find the source of the eggs.  There's a ridiculous scene in the hotel where the woman is locked in her bathroom with an egg.  Um...since when do bathroom doors lock from the outside?  Or need a key?  It would have made more sense for someone to just put a chair against the door to keep it from opening, but then we couldn't have the drama of the astronaut busting through a cheap motel door.  Anyway, this does beat the Alien franchise in depicting an alien queen laying the eggs, only their alien queen looks more like Mother Brain from Metroid.  In the end the astronaut shoots it in the eye and problem solved--except there's still an egg in New York that explodes, seemingly harmlessly in a pile of garbage.  Anyway, it's pretty cheesy and kind of gross with those pickle egg things.  Which a "scientist" says are not eggs...and then in the next sentence talks about their "yolks" and goes back to calling them eggs.  And why does the queen lay exploding eggs?  What's the point of it?

Attack From Space:  A really low-budget, black-and-white Japanese movie from like 1965.  A bunch of cheap looking aliens send their chunky champion "Starman" to Earth to stop a bunch of space Nazis and their "Death Star."  That looks nothing like the Star Wars one but clearly Lucas ripped it off.  Even by the low standards of sci-fi movies of this era it's pretty bad.

Killers From Space:  This was actually one of the 4 episodes of The Film Crew that features the cast of Rifftrax.  It's from the 50s and stars a young Peter Graves as a scientist who dies when the plane he's in crashes during an atomic bomb test.  Except some aliens revive him and send him back for...reasons.

The aliens are especially goofy-looking as they have these giant eyeballs that are just hilarious.  The alien lair underground also features "giant" creatures that are clearly just normal-sized creatures projected to look larger.

Eventually Peter Graves stops them by overloading the power grid.  One thing noted in the episode is how the camera frequently zooms in really tight on people's faces for no real reason at all.  It's bizarre, though not as bizarre as those alien eyeballs.

Plan 9 From Outer Space:  The granddaddy of bad movies was one of the earliest ones on Rifftrax.  It was also the first live Rifftrax show.

Written, directed, and produced by Ed Wood ("the poor dope wasn't smart enough to spread the blame around!") the plot involves a nonsensical plan by aliens to revive the dead to somehow scare humanity from developing some kind of weapon that could destroy the universe.

The effects are notoriously bad, featuring pie plate UFOs on strings, foam tombstones, and an airplane cockpit even a six-year-old kid could have done better.  It was the last film of Bela Lugosi, who died during the filming, so Ed Wood used a chiropractor to double Lugosi in some scenes--and it shows.  The whole thing is laughably bad, though in context probably not as bad as Star Games.  I'm just saying.