The Day It Came to Earth

Intergalactic mega-star Wink Roberts headlines this gripping tale of alien vengeance.

Gangsters dump the body of an informant into the world's cleanest swamp. A meteorite splashes into the same swamp, causing the waterlogged man to rise from his watery grave. This all occurs next to the local college.

What could have been a rampaging kill-o-thon is actually pretty dull. The annoying college kids are allowed to survive, while the zombie wanders around, taking out his vengeance only on those who killed him.

Co-stars George Gobel in a nearly lifelike performance as a college professor. Also, watch for a very young Rita Wilson as Debbie...

The title alone makes it sound like this movie belongs in the beautiful list of a genuine 1950's Sci-Fi classics, right alongside imaginatively titled stuff like "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers", "War of the Worlds" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Many of my fellow reviewers seem to be convinced (and perhaps they are right) that "The Day it Came to Earth" is purely a parody of those legendary milestones, due to the fact this film stars a famous comedian (George Gobel, with whom I'm personally unfamiliar with) and because the script contains so many goofy situations and over-the-top acting performances. Like I said, perhaps they are right, but I still prefer to think that the creators of "The Day it Came to Earth" nevertheless intended to make a bona fide and refreshing Sci-Fi feature in spite of all their budgetary and professional restraints. Thanks to immeasurably successful franchises like "Star Wars" and "Star Trek", the Sci-Fi genre was going through a revival during the late seventies and thus even alien invasion flicks and all possible variants were being unleashed again. The tone and atmosphere of the film are very uneven, to say the least. It starts out quite seriously, with a mafia execution and the subsequent dumping of the body in a remote little lake. Immediately after this, we're treated to cheerful opening sequences showing a collection of college student pictures to the joyous tunes of fifties twist-music! Then, a cheesy meteorite crashes into the little lake and intergalactic radiation causes the mobster's corpse to emerge from the water – heavily disfigured, of course. The ghoulish creep promptly seeks bloody revenge against his assassins, but then strangely enough he returns to his final resting place in the lake. He comes out for a stroll every now and then, but he doesn't commit any gruesome murders anymore and only seems interested in collecting all the little pieces of rock that fell of the meteorite. Meanwhile, two goofy college guys went swimming in the lake and took back pieces of the meteorite to school. It's a tremendous shame that the monster doesn't continue its killing spree, which is why the film becomes boring before it is even halfway, and it's certainly not appreciated by horror fanatics. The male characters are all dimwits, including the police officers that nickname the monster GeGaGoo (short for Geophysical Gaseous Goon), but the two lead girls are cute and can act a lot better than their male colleagues. I think another reviewer already referred to the similar but much more superior 80's Sci-Fi/horror gem "Night of the Creeps". I agree they would make an excellent double-feature.

Here is a great piece of "bad film" heaven awaiting your rediscovery. The idea for this film is actually kinda cool: radiation from a meteorite which crashes in a swamp re-animates the corpse of a bumped-off gangster who goes around wreaking underlit havoc, namely in an old mansion that our teen protagonists decide to spend a weekend in. This premise might have actually worked were it not for the pitiful excuse for a monster-- some guy in a black jumpsuit with a rubber skull, that you could get at K-Mart for Halloween, which is half torn off. The film's heart is in the right place though-- it has the feel of a bunch of buddies getting together and doing their own tribute to 1950's sci-fi. And the picture looks like someone's home movie too-- what do the avant-gardists say? "The home movie esthetic"? In any case, the film is by turns tedious and delightfully cheesy, and it has a way of staying with you afterwards.

But before we just consider this another film made with unknowns, George Gobel (undoubtedly hired for a weekend while "Hollywood Squares" was on hiatus) makes enough of a cameo appearance to put at least one name in the marquee of whatever drive-in may have played this. Consider too, that this film's creator actually went on to direct "Designing Women" and "Evening Shade" for television!! You just never know... THE DAY IT CAME TO EARTH used to be programmed on Elvira's old TV show. I don't know where they got this endearing obscurity, but applause applause.

I'm a little baffled by both the people here who say it's a terrible movie and those who say it's a "good-bad" movie, i.e. hilariously campy. What no one seems to get, and which is pretty obvious to me, is that this film was intended as satire (albeit fairly low-key satire) of movies like "The Horror of Party Beach" and such. The creature is deliberately lumbering and ridiculous, the meteor FX laughable, the college kids played as comedic retro airheads who are about as depthed as Archie & Jughead & gang. It's not a particularly GOOD spoof, but clearly nothing here is meant to be taken seriously, let alone be scary. Maybe if the movie were unintentionally bad it would have been funnier to me...instead it was just mildly diverting at best and unintentionally not-particularly-funny.

The corpse of a Mafia informant, reanimated by powers from beyond, rises nightly from a watery grave to reek vengeance and recover the source of his bodily resurgence. Sounds like the makings of a good parody of everything from Frankenstein to The Mummy to Night of the Living Dead, huh? Well, yeah, but only a few of the laughs in this wannabe lampoon are intentional. A whole lot more of them are not. No satire on earth could be brought to life from such a slipshod script, spartan sets, and profoundly unstellar performances. George Gobel, who could have made a comedic splash with his signature dry and droll personae, is instead doused in a role as a straight-up pedagogue of a prof who explains what asteroids are and such. Most of the movie's attempts at humor fall with a thud harder than a meteor hitting the moon. Sometimes, though--like an elephant joke--it's the sheer flat unfunniness of these attempts that make them so risible. And this film is full of them. There's no time given to introspection in such an uncerebral offering, so the pace never slows down enough to make the movie dull. Like the turquoise-looking asteroid itself, it's something of a little gem.