Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America

The cinematic equivalent of John Oswald's plunderphonics which takes as its theme the demented paranoia of Cold-War militarism and fleshes it out with an ultra-critical pastiche of found-footage, comprising SF and black ops imagery amonst other stock sources, to launch a sustained attack on US intervention against the self determination movements of Latin America. Baldwin has called it a "pseudo pseudo documentary," a film that tells the truth about American imperialism and anti-socialist countersubversion through the faux documentary genre. At a formal level, Baldwin's film is an exercise in Brechtian postmodernism in which techniques of defamiliarization, verfremdungseffect, and cognitive shock tactics are exploited to produce a work of political art that is at once incisive and baffling. Ostensibly, the film claims to reveal an ancient conspiracy in which a race of aliens, originating, appropriately, from the planet Quetzalcoatl, have infiltrated South America and are waging a clandestine war with the United States. However, through its formal techniques and diacritical strategies, Tribulation 99 is simultaneously engaged in a damning indictment of the US government's historically tenured policy of political destabilisation throughout the Americas.

This film by Craig Baldwin is seemingly a tribute to the type of stream of consciousness documentaries that Winston Wheeler Dixon was known for making in the late 1970's. A constant stream of vaguely connected but consistently outlandish out ideas barrage the viewer while clips from b-movies (ranging from Death Race 2000 to a slew of 1950's sci-fi/horror movies) accompany the narration. Through this mechanism we are given a story of how aliens have lived under the Earth for some time, manipulating global politics in an attempt to control mankind. It has the potential to be great as they take actual historical events such as the Bay of Pigs or the C.I.A. backed Guatemalan rebellion and view it through the lens of alien conspiracy. Sadly while these and other individual stories are quite fun, their lack of connection to the other stories severely diminishes any enjoyment that might be derived. My suggestion is to stick with the originals and leave this to languish in obscurity.

Directed by Craig Baldwin (Negativland's "Sonic Outlaws"), Trib99 offers a Grand Unified Theory of Conspiracies including Castro, Kennedy, the wolf man, killer bees, the Panama Canal, and the United Fruit Company. As with any good conspiracy theory a surprising amount of the information is 100% fact with a small amount of completely unverifiable speculation to tie it together. Assembled completely from stock footage.

I have no idea why anyone grades this movie over 1 star. For even one star is far too much. After seeing this it is obvious Ed Wood should have been granted an Oscar. This is a kind of semi documentary informing us about every possible conspiracy the world has known from the 1940's onwards. I guess even people who dig conspiracy theories can't make any sense out of this one. The makers didn't do any shooting of footage themselves. They just cut pieces out of existing B-movies and better still Z-movies. Including titles. No matter whether black and white or colour, known (Godzilla) or fully obscure. A voice over explains things to us. Well, there is nothing to explain. It is just utter baloney. For just ten minutes it is nice to see the cuttings from 1950's and 1960's SF and horror, but that gets to be boring very soon. The nonsense is so overdone that for the first 15 minutes there is something to laugh about. But then you are stunned only and after 30 minutes you realize that this is just sheer nonsense, the cheapest way of making a movie: take cuts from other movies and put them together. If this is done intelligently it is OK. But here it makes the movie look as cheap as it is, as ridiculous as it is and as unwanted as it is. According to this movie aliens paralyzed Eisenhower. I almost sewed this movie for causing a sincere headache. Please, avoid this movie at all cost.

A wonderful and peculiarly disturbing movie, with Baldwin's patented quick cuts, pop culture mashup, and political commentary filtered through a science-fiction conceit that has achieved a grotesque and influential life in the real world.

By the end, the viewer's head is spinning and laughter is undercut with questions of just what one does and doesn't know about the history of our time. A spin on conspiracy theory thinking that has evidently spawned its owned flock of conspiracy theories.

Hasn't anyone yet shown that this was the inspiration for David Icke's insane second career?