The Day It Came to Earth

I'm a little baffled by both the people here who say it's a terrible movie and those who say it's a "good-bad" movie, i.e. hilariously campy. What no one seems to get, and which is pretty obvious to me, is that this film was intended as satire (albeit fairly low-key satire) of movies like "The Horror of Party Beach" and such. The creature is deliberately lumbering and ridiculous, the meteor FX laughable, the college kids played as comedic retro airheads who are about as depthed as Archie & Jughead & gang. It's not a particularly GOOD spoof, but clearly nothing here is meant to be taken seriously, let alone be scary. Maybe if the movie were unintentionally bad it would have been funnier to me...instead it was just mildly diverting at best and unintentionally not-particularly-funny.

Here is a great piece of "bad film" heaven awaiting your rediscovery. The idea for this film is actually kinda cool: radiation from a meteorite which crashes in a swamp re-animates the corpse of a bumped-off gangster who goes around wreaking underlit havoc, namely in an old mansion that our teen protagonists decide to spend a weekend in. This premise might have actually worked were it not for the pitiful excuse for a monster-- some guy in a black jumpsuit with a rubber skull, that you could get at K-Mart for Halloween, which is half torn off. The film's heart is in the right place though-- it has the feel of a bunch of buddies getting together and doing their own tribute to 1950's sci-fi. And the picture looks like someone's home movie too-- what do the avant-gardists say? "The home movie esthetic"? In any case, the film is by turns tedious and delightfully cheesy, and it has a way of staying with you afterwards.

But before we just consider this another film made with unknowns, George Gobel (undoubtedly hired for a weekend while "Hollywood Squares" was on hiatus) makes enough of a cameo appearance to put at least one name in the marquee of whatever drive-in may have played this. Consider too, that this film's creator actually went on to direct "Designing Women" and "Evening Shade" for television!! You just never know... THE DAY IT CAME TO EARTH used to be programmed on Elvira's old TV show. I don't know where they got this endearing obscurity, but applause applause.

Intergalactic mega-star Wink Roberts headlines this gripping tale of alien vengeance.

Gangsters dump the body of an informant into the world's cleanest swamp. A meteorite splashes into the same swamp, causing the waterlogged man to rise from his watery grave. This all occurs next to the local college.

What could have been a rampaging kill-o-thon is actually pretty dull. The annoying college kids are allowed to survive, while the zombie wanders around, taking out his vengeance only on those who killed him.

Co-stars George Gobel in a nearly lifelike performance as a college professor. Also, watch for a very young Rita Wilson as Debbie...

the famous line from George Gobel as Dr. Bartholemew which I'm surprised you haven't included in your memorable quotes:" "I choose to call the creature the (writing on a blackboard here) "gee-ga-goo"---geological (underline) gaseous (underline) goon (underline).""

Probably the only movie other than The Indestructible Man where a mobster turns monster. The Day it Came to Earth must never be confused with its second-rate cousins The Day it Fell to Earth or The Man Who Fell to Earth.It was the best thing George Gobel ever did, including playing the accordion and occupying the corner on Hollywood Squares. It was never adequately explained why a meteor would reanimate a dead body, but as we all know, radiation can make you big, make you small, make your flesh melt off your bones, turn you into a wasp, give you super strength, allow you to pass through walls: do anything, in fact, except kill you...

This film is pretty cheap and dire, with occasional flashes of fun and a lot of very dark cinematography.

The amazing thing is, I think it's supposed to be funny. There's a scene where the police detective (who believes the kids' story about the monster) says that what they're dealing with is a "Geophysical Gaseous Goon." He helpfully writes this on a blackboard for his bemused subordinate.

He then suggests that they abbreviate it to "GeGaGoo" in order to refer to the creature. Really. Someone wrote that, and someone else filmed it, and everyone thought it was good enough to put in the movie.

I think "Wow" is the appropriate response.