Terrore sotto il sole di mezzanotte

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".

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.

On the DVD I rented there were two versions of the same movie, Horror in the Midnight Sun, and Invasion of the Animal People. Although these are quite different, IMDb has these listed together as Rymdinvasion i Lappland. Horror in the Midnight Sun was a fairly decent movie. It's another low budget B movie from the late 50s. A lot of these have their problems and Horror in the Midnight Sun is no exception but it is an entertaining movie. It was also interesting to watch a movie of this genre that is Swedish/American made. It's a Swedish version of a B Sci/Fi monster movie. I'm glad I watched it. It was nothing special but still decent. Invasion of the Animal People was not as good and by itself would be a mess. When seen after watching Horror in the Midnight Sun, it does show how a movie can be cut up, pieces spliced in and the movie changed. Watching to see what and how the film was changed was the only thing I found interesting with Invasion of the Animal People. If you're really into 50s Sci/Fi B monster movies, you should take a look at Horror In The Midnight Sun but if you only have a chance to see Invasion of the Animal People, don't bother.

"Invasion of the Animal People," though carrying a 1961 copyright, is actually a 1958 production originally titled "Rymdinvasion i Lappland" (Space Invasion of Lappland), made in Sweden by Hollywood director Virgil Vogel, coming off a pair of marginal Universal entries, "The Mole People" and "The Land Unknown." The arctic setting certainly provides a more interesting backdrop than anything that happens on film, as a trio of aliens burrow into the snow and ice, allowing a solitary creature to escape, approximately 20 feet tall and covered in fur. We only get to see the 'animal person' during the final two reels of an 80 minute feature, actually 9 minutes longer than the original, despite several scenes of exposition shortened and streamlined (Warren's theatrical edit lasted under an hour at a mere 55 minutes). The perpetrator of this 'new' movie was our old friend Jerry Warren, a hustler adept at taking other people's films and making a fast buck out of them, adding newly shot footage of his own that adds nothing but running time. Such was the case here, as John Carradine supplies three minutes of on screen narration to open the film, after which we only occasionally hear his sterling voice propping up the deadly dull proceedings. Warren needlessly begins his version with an abominable 17 straight minutes of new dialogue heavy scenes, utilizing actress Barbara Wilson for proper continuity, so by the time we reach the original footage it's a painless rendition of the unreleased "Terror in the Midnight Sun" (interrupted by only two additional Warren-shot scenes). Gorgeous brunette Barbara Wilson did a fairly daring nude scene in the Swedish version, also a veteran of pulsating pulchritude in "Teenage Doll," "Blood of Dracula," and "The Flesh Eaters." Screenwriter Arthur C. Pierce continued in the genre vein with "The Cosmic Man," "Beyond the Time Barrier," "The Human Duplicators," "Mutiny in Outer Space," "Women of the Prehistoric Planet," "Dimension 5," "Cyborg 2087," "The Destructors," and "The Astral Factor." Jerry Warren deserves some small credit for hardly tampering with what he had, but not for the two additional reels of nonsensical claptrap. Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater aired this Carradine title on four occasions between 1968 and 1971.

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.