UFO: Target Earth

2001 A Space Odyssey had the same effect on sci fi movies as Velvet Underground & Nico had on rock music. Seems like alot of movies in the early 70s were inspired to go the philosophical route with Sci Fi movies after 2001. Solaris is the best example. Star Trek the Motion Picture was probably written in the early 70s years before it debuted in 1979, you can tell by its plot. The first season of Space 1999 and many low Low LOW budget movies like this were like 2001 sans the budget and Strauss

This movie tries too hard to be a no budget 2001 type sci fi movie. If you can make it to the ending, you will see exactly what I mean. The impact of the ending is on par with the tacked on ending to Doomsday Machine. Its all set in Georgia and its about alien vistors seeking some kind of chosen prophet or whatever. They conveniently land their ship underwater so the filmmakers never have to make a cheap little ship to film with forced perspective. You also never see a single actor in a rubbery alien costume. Actors fool around with equipment and act all goofy to establish the aliens are already here making contact. In alot of ways, it is an ultra low budget (and boring) precursor to Close Encounters of a Third Kind. Basically its the same story but with 2001 influences showing all over the ending. It is really close to Close Encounters now that I think of it but without subplots like family squabbles and government interference.

I have this movie on a double DVD with Unknown World which was an early 50s movie about fruitcake scientists burrowing to the center of the earth thinking atomic war will inevitably destroy everything on the surface and they'll be perfectly safe thousands of miles underground and discover beaches and waterfalls there. If I can't sleep, I put that dvd on. There is not much going on to get too interested in but just enough to have on, same effect as slightly interesting new age music. No campy fun like the Milpitas Monster, Giant Spider Invasion or Night of the Lepus. Good thing the TV has a timer.....

To say this movie is terrible is not only an insult to the word "terrible," it's also not quite accurate. I mean, don't get me wrong, it is terrible, but it's terrible in its own unique way. You've never seen terrible quite like this, and if you're lucky, you never well.

The characters are colorless, the story (if I may be so bold) slow-moving, the cinematography is murky and the camera work inexplicable. Just as an example, there are extreme close-ups and sudden shock zooms when nothing is happening on screen. The acting is competent, though it's hard to tell, given the script. The lead guy, who sounds like Kyle McLaughlin, reads his lines without any trouble. The others are just kind of there, except for the woman who plays the professor. She really bites the cake with her awful flat acting, easily outdistancing everyone else in smashing any interest into a thin, watery paste.

What really stands out, though, is the dialog. Not since Edward D. Wood, Jr, has such utter blather been essayed about with such abandon. In fairness to Mr. Wood, at least his dialog had some relevance to the story. Here, there are endless, pointless discussions about everything under the sun, only occasionally straying into relevant territory. "Would you like a donut?" "Can anyone really ever 'have' a donut? Don't we actually just take one more moment from a happy childhood and cloak it in our concept of 'donut'?" That's not actual dialog from the film, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deleted scene out there....

The whole film strikes me as a movie made by someone who had never actually seen a movie, but had heard them mentioned casually by other people from time to time. One day, this person comes across a camera abandoned in the woods. Rather than tell a story, he just films his friends saying things. He invites them on a camping holiday and films them saying some more things. He gets a couple of them jump into the lake, because he'd heard people did those sorts of things in movies.

Really, the level of ineptitude on display is astonishing--unbelievable, almost. You would have to work hard to reach these heights (or depths) and I don't think anyone connected to this worked that hard. Thus, the incredible ending strikes me not so much as an obvious rip-off of "2001" but rather an attempt to remake that ending after only being told an incomplete, rambling description by someone who'd seen it while drunk.

This is an incredible movie. It's not got everything! No plot, no tension, no character (let alone character development) - what it HAS got is a virtuoso display of incredibly bad direction and a script that gives the word meaningless a new... er... meaning.

I suspect the director must have once had the concept of the Line of Interest (or the Centre Line, Director's Line call it what you will*) explained to him at some time but either forgot it almost immediately or just didn't get it because the camera is plonked down any old place and they shot whatever came into the viewfinder. Several times we get to watch people have long telephone conversations, but only from one end so we get to watch them say things like: "Yes I know all that." without having any idea what they have just been told. There are boom mikes in shot, tracks clearly visible, the DP does a great line in camera flares over people's faces and the sound levels are all over the place whole swathes of "dialogue" obscured by lousy songs. Though to be fair the sound problems may just be the quality of the DVD copy I saw; there was a lot of extraneous noise on the soundtrack (the songs ARE pretty sh1tty though). The script is bizarre; I honestly had no idea what was going on for the entire length of the film.

The film opens with 3 minutes of mocumentary footage of people relating UFO experiences to a TV reporter. Then the opening credits (which were illegible on the copy I watched). Open on a young man trying to make a phone call then a portentous Voice Over (a la Ed Wood) tells us this young man is about to overhear something that will change his life forever. He somehow accidentally overhears two military types authorising a scramble of jets to investigate a UFO. The young man stares out of the window for a long time then phones someone else to make an appointment with someone else who turns out to be a psychic UFO spotter (or something). He then goes to meet his professor who lectures him (and us) at great length about the possibility of Life in the Universe. He goes to see 'Dr Mansfield' (whoever she is, we aren't told) and they have a conversation that really started the 'What the hell are they talking about?' ball rolling. The last line of the scene is "When a circle is drawn - they meet." Work backwards from there. After that it was a downhill slide into utter incomprehensibility. Ending in a low rent 2001: A Space Odyssey rip-off and the final bars of Khachaturian's Spartacus playing as the alien's space ship, trapped under a lake for a thousand years, zooms off to the stars powered only by Alan's imagination. Yep, you read that right, a bunch of aliens sat at the bottom of a lake for a thousand years waiting for a bad actor with a bald wig on to come and power their spaceship with his imagination. Insane.

Favourite shot: Vivian and Alan sit in the back of the van excitedly telling each other some incomprehensible facts that are supposed to make the audience sit up and pay attention. They stop and the camera slowly zooms out leaving two bad actors sitting there waiting for the director to shout 'cut'. Luckily a huge lens flare obliterates them for most of it so we don't have to see them suffer too much.

Favourite lines (favourite as in they made more sense than most. Three whole lines before I went WTF? )

Prof: What do we know about electricity?

Alan: We know it's an energy source.

Prof: Like the imagination.

This is sublime stuff. Thoroughly recommended as a true awful classic. Seven out of ten on the Awfulometer.

* An imaginary line drawn between two or more actors (and / or objects). Keeping the camera on one side of that line for several angles on one scene will allow those shots to be edited together with ease. Cross the line during shooting and you start having real problems as the on screen relationship between characters changes. Edit between the two and you get characters swapping places with each other and jumping from left to right of each other etc. Trust me, it's an easy concept to grasp, I'm just not explaining it very well.

This is surely some college assignment. First movie for all of them, writer, director and actors. Even the boom mic holder. I gave them 3 stars for not being ashamed of making this thing. One of my favs is the horrible white wig the "old relic" guy wears. It moves a bit and does not cover his own gray hair. It looks like a plastic helmet in the front. Funny. The entire premise is so silly but they do stay true to it. Watch and enjoy something so bad it is OK. Cheap effects. Poorly lit. Everything is wrong but you should see it. It won't make you cry.

Aside from a really cool title and a neato disco UFO trip movie opening titles sequence, this movie sucks. Ever hear of a movie called BOG about a swamp monster that goes on the rampage and starts tearing apart ply-board movie sets? BOG is a better movie that UFO: TARGET EARTH. Ever seen Larry Buchanan's ZONTAR, THING FROM VENUS? ZONTAR: THING FROM VENUS is a better movie than UFO: TARGET EARTH.

I very fondly remember the UFO craze that gripped Amercia around the time of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, and while a bit early (1974) this film is surely a part of that craze. There were a bunch of faux documentary films on UFOs & other worldly phenomenon at about the same time -- my favorite will always be IN SEARCH OF NOAH'S ARK -- and I was kind of hoping this would be one of them. It isn't, and the last 20 minutes of TV blending feedback color head trip space junk might be great free-form visual expression, but please.

I wish I could be kinder on this film: The only UFOs you see are still photos used for the opening credits, which I come back to again as the high point of the film. I suppose if you were zonked out of your mind on blotter acid this might be somewhat engaging, it has a sort of naive earnestness about itself that is charming in a slack-jawed kind of way. I also dig the cheapo 70s interiors, editing room (literally) production design, and the idea of trying to make a movie about UFOs that essentially consists of people sitting around talking about them, followed by endless sequences of pre CAD or Apple Mac computer renderings instead of showing us space aliens. Kind of like the end of 2001 (complete with an ambiguous close-up of a star person's eye) but without all the fuss & bother involved with getting us there.

Something tells me also that the three 8/10 votes dragging this movie's user ratings curve up to 4/10 are in on the plot to deprive target audience viewers of a film with a name like UFO: TARGET EARTH of 83 minutes of their life that could be spent doing constructive things like playing golf, masturbating, or strangling small animals.

3/10; I did just raise it a point after reconsidering the movie. It's awful but then again like eating snails, awful movies can be an acquired taste. Try lemon butter sauce, or better yet a case of beer.