Les visiteurs de l'au-delà

I watched this around 1995. I was a teen, it was very late in the night, I was in the country. The alien experimenting scenes were marked in my memory. I couldn't sleep for days and I still can see the scenes when I close my eyes, more than 20 years later.

Intruders, an over-long made for television movie, ranks as my third favorite film made on the topic of ufo's and alien abduction. Only Communion and The Interrupted Journey ranks ahead of it.

Richard Crenna, the film's protagonist, is a therapist who must deal with the reality of ufo's when one of his patients thrusts an "alien abduction" account onto his plate. His initial reaction is to brush her off as a nutcase. Soon, when other people with similar accounts journey into his life, he begins to take a serious look at the possibility of ufo's actually abducting people.

His investigation begins to uncover a certain amount of evidence and a government involvement(pre-X-Files) that forces him to take a 180 degree turn in his feelings about the subject.

Richard Crenna, as pointed out by another commenter, does seem to be a composite of artist and author Budd Hopkins and Harvard professor John Mack. Crenna is very good in his role. I especially enjoyed watching his characters transition from non-believer into believer.

The film is frightening in its depictions of abductions and encounters with aliens. There are several sequences featuring abductions and several scenes on board ufo's. Where Fire In The Sky seemed to tease the audience, Intruders wants to bombard it.

Very, very frightening! A must see!

INTRUDERS is a pretty good exploration of the alien abduction phenomenon, based on a book by real-life abductee Budd Hopkins. As a three hour TV movie it holds the attention throughout, boasting an excellent turn from Richard Crenna as a psychiatrist who gets drawn into the unusual reports from one of his patients and ends up leading a crusade against government cover-ups.

The only real negative thing about INTRUDERS is that it was made in the 1990s, where all such TV movies inevitably look cheap and ramshackle to modern audiences. Indeed, there's an often cheap and cheesy look and feel to the production, which saps the realism. But there are also many reasons to tune in, as this is a drama that narrowly predates THE X-FILES and handles an outlandish subject matter in a surprisingly mature way.

The film is also rather frightening for its time, focusing extensively on the abduction scenes; there are lots of nightmarish moments involving the "Greys" here, and the spooky atmosphere is understandable when you find out that Dan Curtis (proponent of many a 1970s TV horror flick) is the guy who directed it. Crenna was always an underrated actor and I can't help but feel this might be one of his greatest late stage performances.

Definitely one of the better "UFO-epics" out there. BUT, the version released on DVD is much shorter compared to the version showed on TV, and that's a shame. One of the most prominent and important scenes, when Dr. Chase have found a circle of burned grass at Leslie's back yard and two neighbor children is sitting by and waiting "for the moon to come down again" is totally missing. There are also several more key scenes edited out. For example the scene where two government agents "visits" Dr. Chase and tell him not to waste his time on this "abduction" rubbish.

We can only hope for a proper DVD release in the future, with all material from the network version inserted again.

If you like this one, you should give "Fire In The Sky" (1993) a try.

This is one of the best treatments of this subject available, far more accurately reflecting its (non-fiction) source material than "Communion," for example, or "Fire in the Sky." The way in which Crenna's character (probably a composite of Budd Hopkins and the late Dr. John Mack) slowly comes to believe his terrified and bewildered "patients," in spite of a healthy skepticism, is quite persuasive. The human dramas associated with witness reports are the focus here (as they are in the excellent "The UFO Incident"), and the visual effects, though gasp-producing, take care not to distort those reports. All the performances are first-rate. One of the three writers, incidentally,Tracey Tormé--the son of the later singer-songwriter, Mel Tormé--is also one of the writers of "Fire in the Sky."