UFO: Target Earth

This is really a terrible movie. I remember years ago when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out. All the heads would go to it to see the colors when the guy goes through the star gate. This one has colored geometric shapes. Far out. There is this silly subplot with this guy hooking up with one of his own kind and morphing into another dimension. It actually sounds intelligent until you see it. It is dull, dull, dull. It is thoughtless, thoughtless, thoughtless. As this young man searches for his own meaning, others move around him, confused. Just like the audience. There are long, pontificating speeches. "I'll know it when I see it." "I know I'm destined for it." Gee, I wonder what it is. I'm sure that the makers of this really saw it as an artistic endeavor. However, Stanley Kubrick, they ain't.

UFO: Target Earth (1974)

BOMB (out of 4)

Incredibly stupid and silly sci-fi flick about a dorky young man who starts to investigate UFO's and then hears strange noises coming from a local lake where it was reported decades earlier that a spaceship crashed. This is a really stupid and really, really silly little film that doesn't have a single thing going for it. The movie runs under 80-minutes and for the life of me a story never starts. The film opens with various locals talking about their encounters with UFOs but even these stories are boring and what follows just gets even worse. The acting is off the map bad as is the direction and I swear my 3-year-old cousin could have came up with better dialogue. And let's not even talk about the special effects. The one interesting thing is that the ending somewhat resembles Close Encounters of the Third Kind and knowing Spielberg loves these types of films I'm rather curious if he had seen this or been influenced by it.

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.

I kind of enjoyed the leisurely pace of the movie; it was sort of a nostalgic flashback to a time when movies moved slowly enough for me to absorb all elements in a scene, instead of flashing through at such a breakneck speed that much information is lost. It was a dopey movie with mostly inept acting and a dopey premise (the aliens' speeches at the end sounded like any given night on George Noory), but it wasn't totally a waste of time. The music was pleasant; the whole movie had a kind of amateurish charm to it. I wouldn't ever watch it again, but I don't regret the time I spent on it. I have sat through far worse. And it is a little time capsule of 1974.

This was an incredible sleeper that was hyped as some type of spooky, mysterious story regarding a UFO encounter. Instead it was a boring, painfully slow yarn lacking any special effects or visual excitement. The script called for the characters to talk about something in a lab; then go to a wilderness location, sit down and talk about something; then go to another location, sit down and talk about something; then go to another location, sit down and talk some more; then maybe decide to sit down in a forest location and rehash what they just talked about. Had the dialogue been any good or even slightly stimulating, then perhaps this would have been OK; but this dull script felt as though it had been written in haste or just ad-libbed by the actors in order to get it released quickly to take advantage of the UFO craze of the seventies.

By the time of the "climactic" final scene, the audience expected to maybe finally have a glimpse of some spectacular space craft relic or alien body part, but instead all that was presented was one character shouting "for god's sake" numerous times at another who decides to follow some "imaginative call" to go into a lake believed to be a UFO crash site. The ultimate fates of these two characters are not discussed here so as to avoid "spoiling" this for anyone desperate enough to sit through the whole thing; but suffice it to say, those still awake in the audience by this point yet again were not treated to anything interesting.

For a very good reason, this is a film probably never to be found on video.