Past Misdeeds: The Alien Encounters (1979)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Astronomer Alan Reed (Augie Tribach) is up in Alaska with his family, manning a telescope in the search for life in outer space. One day, Reed seems to be on the verge of a major breakthrough observing radio signals coming from Barnard's Star, but he gets a bit distracted from that - as well as a potential UFO sighting - by the house his wife and little son are in going up in flames in a gas explosion.

With his family dead, Reed crawls into a bottle until the sudden realization hits him that the last signals he got from Barnard's Star seem to have contained an actual voice saying something in an alien language (note: the audience never gets to hear it that way). Reed stops drinking at once and turns into one of those holy crusaders roaming the American highways in search of the Truth, researching alien encounters, ghost sightings and so on, everywhere.

Five years later, Reed arrives at the house of the widow (Patricia Hunt) and teenage son (Matthew Boston) of one Dr. Arlyn. Arlyn has written quite a few books on Reed's favourite topic, and was supposed to be building a machine for human cell regeneration called the Betatron (not to be confused with the Metatron or that guy from the bible) before he died. Obviously, our hero has a few questions about that. It will take quite a few scenes of sitting and flashbacking and hiking through deserts and hills while flashbacking until the Arlyns trust Reed enough to point him in the direction of a truth containing benevolent aliens, flying silver spheres and the evil men in black (who, disappointingly, don't wear black). Somehow, there's also room for a short flashback visit, a rather slow car chase sequence and some hair-curdling soft rock (alas not with lyrics actually connected to what's happening on screen) in the film. And yes, Mister Mulder, they have been here for a very long time.

I still fondly remember James T. Flocker's Ghosts That Still Walk as a wonderfully peculiar example of US independent local filmmaking, so I went into the same director's The Alien Encounters with some hope, but also a certain amount of trepidation based on my experience that many of the most interesting local films of this type come by their value through a rather alchemical process which might not necessarily be repeatable in a second movie. Turns out my hope was more justified than my trepidation.
However, before I come to that, I have to give the usual warnings about movies of this type: if you can't ignore a film's obvious technical flaws in favour of its odd (perhaps dubious) charms, this just isn't for you. So, yes, The Alien Encounters has all the problems I went in expecting from it: the acting's rather wooden (although lead Augie Tribach's long rambling off-screen narration that at times gives the whole affair the feel of a very weird pseudo-documentary in the Charles B. Pierce mould is much better than his on-screen acting), the shot composition is often bland, and the script tends to go on and on with scenes that exist for no particular reason, or takes detours into not always necessary and nearly always overlong flashbacks without moving the plot (such as it is) forward one iota, until it's not always clear if you're watching a movie, or a movie is circling around you, ready to pounce or fall asleep.

What the film has going for it makes being patient often worthwhile, though - and is certainly where my hopes for Flocker were fulfilled. Even with its director's not exactly exciting visual style, Alien Encounters still manages to build a peculiar mood of (a bit awkward) otherness out of its own flaws. There's often a point in a movie when rambling pacing turns from boring to hypnotically interesting for me and the film at hand reaches it early and with skewed enthusiasm. Plus, there's also the thing even a lack of budget and experience can't ruin - landscape. One should never underestimate the possibility of something as simple as rocky hills and desert to turn from quotidian to slightly odd in a viewer's mind when a movie just insists on showing enough of it, and that's exactly what happened to me with The Alien Encounters. Once the natural world has turned strange, it only takes a little effort to find the classic US UFO mythology in the movie fascinating again instead of played out.


Still, said UFO mythology certainly is the film's weak point compared to Flocker's more imaginative Ghosts. The older movie was particularly effective in mashing up some of the 70s' greatest paranormal hits with really peculiar ideas very much Flocker's own; The Alien Encounters just tries to reproduce stories that everyone has heard a thousand times before (even though, honestly, I like these stories), and only comes into its own in what may seem like accidents of production. Or would seem like accidents if Ghosts didn't suggest Flocker to be a man with peculiar interests and talents hell-bent on putting them on screen, even if it means packaging them inside of forteana's greatest hits.

Past Misdeeds: Ghosts That Still Walk (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The teeth-grindingly sweet American teenager Mark (Matthew Boston) suffers from weird headaches and seizures. His doctors fail to find a physical explanation for the boy's symptoms, but there is enough strangeness to his family backstory to let them recommend psychiatrist and holistic weirdo Dr. Sills (Rita Crafts) to his grandmother Alice (Ann Nelson). Since the death of his grandfather Henry (Jerry Jensen) during a vacation trip with Alice and the nervous breakdown his mother Ruth (Caroline Howe) had, Granny is the only grown-up taking care of Mark, and in her bible quoting, but sweet way she's more than willing to go to Dr. Sills if it is of any help to her grandson.

Now, if someone suffering from Mark's problems came to you, you'd probably try and concentrate your first inquiries on him. Dr. Sills doesn't. She seems a lot more interested in the grandparents' deadly vacation trip and the notes his mother took while working on her last book, a treatise on a little known South-Western tribe of Native Americans.

Granny has repressed most of what happened on the fateful vacation in their camper, but every quack's best friend - hypnosis - leads to the rather puzzling story of an invisible force taking control of the elderly couple's car and driving them out into the desert where they are attacked by rolling stones (not the Rolling Stones, mind you). More invisible force shenanigans follow, until poor Henry dies from a heart attack while balancing on the top of a rampaging camper. Alice chooses to treat everything that has happened as a dream message send to her directly from her old buddy God, but mostly represses the whole incident.

Even more interesting than the hypnosis session with the old woman is what her daughter's notes have to say. Ruth found the mummy of a Native in the desert and got it into her head to revive the dead guy's astral spirit (not to be confused with his physical or mental spirit, as the film helpfully explains) to learn all that is to learn about his tribe's culture. Mummy-man is rather grumpy though, and bad things start to happen.

Of course, now that Dr. Sills is on the case, there's just a little mumbo jumbo to go through until we get to something amounting to a happy ending.

Among the few people that know his name, Ghosts That Still Walk's director James T. Flocker's films have the reputation of being as weird as they are cheap, and Ghosts surely isn't an exception. Part horror film, part new age idiocy fest, it is wholly peculiar.

Technically, there's not too much to talk about here - for a locally produced low budget film, Ghosts looks nice enough, the acting's not all terrible and everything does feel mostly competently made, while the plotting drags and meanders to get the film to a sellable running time, as is usual in this type of film.

What is more interesting, and therefore actually worth talking about here, is the truly weird mood Flocker somehow summons out of a mobile home, a few unremarkable interiors and a whole lot of desert. It's not a truly horrifying type of weirdness, but rather the feeling that something about the film is slightly off, as if Flocker was visiting us from a parallel dimension just a wee bit different from our own, a place where you just make a film about possessive spirits and rolling stones without showing the slightest bit of scepticism about your ideas and where no viewer has any disbelief that might need suspension.

Usually, I am quite annoyed when filmmakers throw their new age beliefs in my face (even I have standards regarding how much stupidity I am willing to take), but in this case I have no problems with making an exception for the sheer matter-of-factness of the film's tone and the unusual nature of the rolling stone scenes. The latter aren't as suspenseful as Flocker seems to have imagined them, but work as a perfect way to achieve that floating feeling non-mainstream cinema can induce in the brain.

The beauty of the whole thing is how little sense it makes to people not inhabiting the filmmaker's mind, while it is completely obvious that to him, it all is perfectly sensible and logical.

There is a constant tension between the mundanity of the non-desert places (too) much of Ghosts takes place in and Flocker's bizarre brand of new age Christianity. It's as if your pious, but down to earth grandmother suddenly started to explain to you how perfectly common astral travel was in the bible, and reincarnation? Totally Jesus' way!

One can feel an admirable stubbornness at work somewhere below the simple surface of the film; while watching, I could never shake off the feeling that I was witnessing something intensely personal, made by a true believer in something that could never be properly articulated through a more common filmic language, always waiting for a possibility to get out, yet never really able to.

I'd call the film a major achievement, if I only knew what exactly it does achieve, or what Flocker set out to achieve with it.

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On WTF: The Alien Encounters (1979)

Remember James T. Flocker? The heroic director of the rather great Ghosts That Still Walk was one of the few among the local indie directors I like to champion who made more than one film.

But will The Alien Encounters be quite as weird as Ghosts? Will there be attack rocks again? Find out in my write-up on WTF-Film!

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Ghosts That Still Walk

If you want to know what I have to say about director James T. Flocker's epochal new age horror film Ghosts That Still Walk (and really, how couldn't you), you should follow this handy link to my write-up on WTF-Film.

Expect to see an elderly couple attacked by rolling stones (all looking a lot younger than Keith Richards) and other delights.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,new age crap,james t. flocker,reviews,other places