La quatrième rencontre

I like movies about UFOs, which is why I recently decided to rewatch EYES BEHIND THE STARS after seeing it when I was a kid back in the late 1970s. And now I'm compelled to write a review about it because I'm afraid I'll start forgetting everything about it FAST. You see, even though EBTS ain't bad, it's VERY dull and nondescript. The story is sorta interesting but flat. The actors are good but their roles are boring and a little confusing. The FX are terribly amateurish but I can overlook something like that if the movie is compelling, which, unfortunately, this one ain't.

Also, there's very little violence and there's no nudity whatsoever, which makes this 1970s Italian sci-fi opus a TRUE oddity, because if there's one thing that distinguishes Italian genre movies made in the 1970s from genre movies of other countries made in the same decade, it's the astonishing amount of violence and sex to be found in them. Oddly enough, because of the almost complete lack of exploitive elements, EBTS stands out from the rest of the pact. I don't know if this can be seen as a compliment though. Personally, I can enjoy a movie without sex and violence but I think EBTS NEEDED more violence and some sex here and there to spice it up because it is so deadly dull and dry. And the special effects aren't that special.

The story itself is actually interesting. It's a combo of THE X-FILES and Antonioni's BLOWUP: a photographer accidentally captures aliens on film during a fashion shoot in the country. The aliens know they were captured on film and they proceed to kidnap the photographer and a model, subsequently destroying any evidence of their presence on earth. The problem starts when the model meets a man at the recently abducted photographer's apartment (this taking place just before she's to be abducted herself). The man takes some of the negatives and leaves, with the aliens having no knowledge of the missing negatives. The whole story is about this man wanting to know more about the aliens and a secret spy group who want to get a hold of the negatives. The majority of the movie centers around boring political intrigue, in the spy vs spy variety. The UFO element of the story is almost unimportant and could have easily been replaced by any cold war McGuffin. But as dull as EYES BEHIND THE STARS is, it does resemble THE X-FILES a LOT! I wonder if Chris Carter saw this movie. Anyway, the best thing in EBTS are the POV shots, which are creepy and effective. But the rest is almost completely forgettable, including the goofy looking aliens.

Even though I've been mostly negative about this film, I sorta cherish it nonetheless. I still remember the effective ad campaign which scared me when I saw it as a kid. And I own the video. The film could have been so much more if it had been done properly. Oh well...

I got this title as part of a cheap 100-movie sci-fi set. I'm a big fan of 1970s exploitation cinema, and at first, I thought the film had some promise - it looks like it has some good creepy atmosphere, and it's Italian, so there's bound to be some gratuitous violence, gore, and nudity, despite cheesy special effects and a sketchy plot. What's more, even if it's stupid, it's bound to be entertaining!

Okay, I was right about the cheesy effects and sketchy plot, but the rest? Not so much.

This is one of those films in that uncomfortable middle ground in the B-movie hierarchy – it's not sensational enough to be a guilty pleasure or awful enough to be unintentional comedy, yet it's far too incompetent to be considered good on its own merits.

The basic premise is that extraterrestrials are lurking around an unspecified location in the UK for reasons that are never entirely made clear. These aliens can make themselves invisible, but they apparently show up in photographs, as a photographer inadvertently takes pictures of them during a photo shoot with a beautiful female model in the woods. (Note to Italian exploitation fans: She remains fully clothed.) The photographer takes the photos to a journalist and complications ensue; the aliens pursue and abduct the photographer, killing a bystander in the process. The police and the military get involved. More people die. (Note to Italian exploitation fans: There is zero gore.) The journalist consults with a paranoid UFO researcher, and both of them wind up being pursued by shadowy government agents known as the Silencers, along with the aliens. It's basically like an extended episode of the X-Files.

The plot is full of holes and is nearly incoherent at times, which is not necessarily unusual for 70s Italian fare, but the filmmakers take far too long getting to the point. The screenplay and direction are limp and leaden for roughly the first hour of running time; there is virtually no sizzle or excitement until the third act, by which time the viewer is hardly paying attention. Like the American UFO researchers who apparently inspired this piece, the filmmakers evidently took themselves far too seriously to have any fun.

It would be neglectful of me not to explain the title of my review, and give some examples of the filmmaker's incompetence while I'm at it:

~ The sequences of the "invisible" aliens stalking the characters are filmed in the first person, using a fisheye lens, accompanied by a mindless droning high-pitched "chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp" synthesizer track and an occasional metallic heavy-breathing sound. As the aliens approach, the room lights go out, and the characters usually stand still rather than investigating why the lights went out as most normal people presumably would. (Note to Italian exploitation fans: Although the beautiful model is involved in these sequences, she remains fully clothed here too, and the aliens never do anything truly exciting like, say, beheading a character.) The director obviously intended for these sequences to be suspenseful, but he relies on them too much and drags them out far too long – one gets the sense that he was simply padding the movie's running time. What's worse, I could still hear the obnoxious "chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp" in my head the morning after watching the film.

~ The film's British locale is never believable. Not only do none of the buildings look British, but the cars are left-hand drive, and characters' offices and apartments are decorated with picturesque posters with British tourist attractions on them, making the sets look as if they were decorated by a travel agent – which they probably were.

~ Important and potentially exciting plot points happen off-screen. Several deaths are either only discussed, or we only see the aftermath as the police are investigating. What's worse, most of the deaths that occur on-camera are dull – the aliens kill with mysterious "radiation poisoning" and the characters merely keel over. We also never actually see the aliens abduct a character; the abductions are merely implied by fast edits of flashing lights, the camera zooming in on the open door of the flying saucer, and the character appearing inside.

~ The dubbing is truly awful, and annoyingly vacillates between spelling out the letters "U-F-O" and pronouncing it like an acronym, "You-foe." The movie also features some of the most atrociously overblown, pretentious, and utterly nonsensical dialogue I've heard since watching 'R.O.T.O.R.' On the other hand, hearing Martin Balsam being voiced by another person who sounds nothing like him is rather novel and entertaining. (Mr. Balsam must have been really hard up for a paycheck at this point in his career.)

~ The Silencers are some of the sloppiest secret agents in movie history; they travel in an enormous and conspicuous black Cadillac, frequently tailing other characters by only a few car lengths, and they hand off a "secret" audio tape in the middle of a city street in plain view of the character whose conversation they just recorded. In another sequence, the head Silencer dramatically puts on sunglasses indoors before shaking down a character, presumably to conceal his identity, but then he takes them off!

~ When the journalist character finally goes Action Hero in the final act, it comes across as unbelievable, but at least this results in a beat-down sequence that's arguably the film's only high point for Italian exploitation fans (I won't spoil it for you).

~ The ending is rather sudden, and was probably intended to be ironic and cynical, but it came across to me as lazy on the part of the screenwriter and director.

Frankly, if you're looking for low-brow sci-fi thrills, I would skip this one.

Why do I watch movies like this ? - other than I have some weird misguided masochistic belief that one day I will find a true gem amongst all this dross I can't think one one good reason. This movie was dross from start to finish - but semi-hilarious dross. Where else but in a bad Italian dubbed movie could you find heated exchanges of surreal mangled English like this one between a honest military type and the sinister chief of a secret X-files like organisation dedicated to hiding "The Truth":

Man in Black: Silence is best for us until we are able to prove that the UFOs have no bellicose motives.

Military Type: In any event I find your interference abusive.

Man in Black: Whoever has to impose his will is.

I rewound the DVD (you know what I mean) a good half dozen times and I still can't make those lines mean anything sensible. My other fave line was:

"We can be quite hard on those who contravert our interests."

It's English Jim, but not as we know it.

The other highlights of this dull plonker of a movie for me were the totally spaced out acting of the photographer character at the start. Saddled with the worst haircut EVER in the history of everything, the man just wandered around looking like a stunned fish in a bad wig till kidnapped and forced to look at a piece of Plexiglas by some aliens. The aliens are most effectively not seen as a POV shot - hand held camera with a fish-eye lens - sort of spooky the first time but, used over and over again it lost its power (incidentaly, if it is a Point of View shot, it means the aliens always walk out of rooms backwards for some reason).

The film was set in "England". This meant the Spanish Italian set designers put some British number plates on a couple of English cars and put a Union Jack on our hero's press card... and that was about it. No other attempt to make it look like the UK at all.

Favourite moment? When the Foley artists didn't notice that characters they were foleying (is there such a word?) were no longer walking on gravel but were now on the lawn so their feet kept on making loud "crunch! crunch!" noises. Other than that, another total waste of 90 minutes of my life. I hope they prove those UFOs have no bellicose motives soon...

A man is doing a photo shoot with a model out in the middle of a field somewhere, and unknowingly he get's footage of alien craft, and aliens. Once he finds out what he's got he stashes the negatives. Sooner or later someone finds out about it,, a clandestine group within the World Government find out and they will stop and nothing to get the negatives back, because they feel if the information is released to the public at large, it will cause a worldwide panic. Meanwhile the photographer place is tossed and everyone is looking for the negatives, the model shows up later in the movie after being traumatized by the aliens although we do not see this part in the movie,, overall it wasn't bad the first half of the movie,, but the second half just turned me off. so that's why I'm going with a 4 rating.

First, this movie contains no excitement. None. Not an ounce. If you don't like watching B-movies, you don't need to see this. Even if you like B-movies, this one is difficult to sit through, but it has a few things going for it.

Second, it's hardly an ET rip-off. (Did the previous two commentators see the same movie? No way.)

Rather than ET, it more resembles the TV series called "UFO". Some of the characters even pronounce that abbreviation as a word, like "you-foe", which is how they always pronounced "UFO" on "UFO". Early on, the movie does a decent job of presenting a mildly creepy "the aliens are stalking us" mood, & in one or two places, characters speculate that aliens abduct humans to experiment on them. Both of those aspects reminded me of "UFO". Also, there are some scenes through an alien's eye-view. (Oh yeah, & during those scenes, one of the sound-effects is definitely from the Doctor Who story called "Robot".)

But the plot doesn't stay with the "aliens are stalking us" premise. It meanders all over the map of plots. It goes nearly everywhere a plot can go: creepiness, missing persons, journalistic story-hunting, police crime investigation, government conspiracy, international conspiracy, double-crossing double-agents, & even psychics. The plot changes so often & so thoroughly that I felt almost like I was watching different movies. I'd say this is the movie's biggest problem; it's like the writer didn't know what kind of movie he wanted to create.

There's a character who just HAS to be the inspiration for The X-Files' Cancer Man. Even the actor looks like the one who plays Cancer Man. When I saw that character, which is also about the time the plot turns to conspiracy theories, it made me suspect that this movie was some of the inspiration behind The X-Files. I'd almost bet on it. There are also some alien-abduction scenes & talk that resemble that same theme as it's expressed in The X-Files. (But if you are an X-Files fan, don't count on this movie to give you a supplementary X-Files fix. Your standards are probably way too high.)

A curiosity: The version I watched had an English dubbed sound-track. I believe the movie is Spanish (?), but every printed word I recall seeing was English. I thought that was mildly interesting.

The ending was unexpected, I'll grant. I'm not saying it was inspiring, insightful, or clever. I just didn't see it coming.

So, it's a bad movie, for sure, but there are some things about it that provide some food for thought or analysis if you're the kind of person who wants to look for it. (But it really is a pretty bad movie.)