Terror in the Midnight Sun

I have seen a lot of obscure films and am pretty sure that this one must have had the lowest budget in making it. There is a man-like creature that is HUGE- he probably stands 40-60 feet tall. Anyway the Eskimo villagers throw fire torches at it.As for the plot- there may not even be one, other than these people go out into the frozen tundra to look for a cheapie spaceship and then end up skiing half the countryside. I do however, appreciate this show's obscurity- there is , as far as I've ever seen, nothing quite like it- It makes "Plan 9 From Outer Space" look like "Gone With The Wind".

Terror in The Midnight Sun (1959), the title I prefer to use, can be summed up thus:

For some, a Viking good time. For others, a bloody waste of time. So bad, it's good some might say, While yet others might suggest It should never see the light of day!

If you like watching a bunch of people skiing around, you'll love this. An alien saucer lands in the opening round of the movie, and just sits there for about an hour of film running time before anything else involving it happens.

I saw this on one of those late night live-monster host shows, and the riffs the guy did kept the movie from being pretty boring. There's some scientists that want to see the "meteor" that came down, a romance between a couple who flirt on the ski runs, and some other folks that do a reenactment of the mob scene from Frankenstein. You have to wait a long time to see the creature, a really really big hairy guy with ugly teeth, and his brief scene is pretty campy. Still, I liked the Jolly Neanderthal Giant. As for aliens, they show up only once too, just staring at somebody. (One is seen a couple of times from the back, always watching TV).

Innocently silly and mildly amusing. There's loose ends at the end deliberately left for you to ponder. Or laugh at.

One thing to know about this movie is that it was made in two different versions. One Swedish and one American. Most of the ones who have commented this film has obviously seen the American edition that was edited and added with extra scenes.

From what I've read here and heard from others, the Swedish version is much better, still a really bad movie though, and it's a shame that only the American version has made it to the video market.From what I know the Swedish version only exists in one, maybe two, 35mm copies in Sweden and they are frozen for conservation.

I've seen it a couple of times and I cant help laughing. We used to show it here in Kiruna every year at our film festival, Arctic Light Film Festival, but had to stop because it was to expensive to thaw the film.

Invasion of the Animal People (1962)

* (out of 4)

A brief introduction to director Jerry Warren who is the worst in my opinion. Warren would buy foreign movies, cut out the dialogue scenes and then add newly directed scenes so that he could then sell the movie off as his own. These added scenes usually have nothing to do with the "original" movie scenes surrounding them but that can sometimes add to the charm. This film was originally a Swedish production called Terror in the Midnight Sun but Warren chopped it up, added a few scenes with John Carradine and had him serve as the narrator. A spaceship crashes in the mountains and out gets a huge, hairy creature who stalks some scientists. The look of the creature is certainly dumb enough to get a few laughs but this doesn't happen until the final ten minutes and what follows that is pretty hard to get though. Slow, boring, stupid and simply badly made. The added scenes are equally poor. However, it must be said that this is still a lot better than Warren's Attack of the Mayan Mummy and Frankenstein Island.