Laboratory

WOW another excellent movie to appear on The Horror Channel....but enough of my sarcasm, time to talk about them aliens who are trippin the light fantastic.

A group of aliens kidnap some people and take them to a medical clinic to perform seemingly harmless experiments. Most of this movie is set in a clinic and has the kidnapped people trying to figure out what is going on while a few of them under go simple tests but always are being observed by the aliens. That bad guy from The Karate Kid is in this and we have a totally obvious token black guy. The oriental woman doesn't even get to say a word!

The acting is decent but the sets are boring and/or cheap looking. The aliens are made of the same stuff they make disco glitter balls out of. They communicate to the humans with sounds but the whole sound/picture language is way flawed but one of the women picks it up and asks them complex questions using this method. Totally stupid.

A totally bland and cheap movie which is interesting to watch but not much more than that. If it was made today with better effects i doubt it would be that much better. 5/10

Another low rent science fiction from the Robert Emenegger/Allan Sandler team. This one was produced by Anne Spielberg and features Camille Mitchell instead of her dad Cameron, who appeared in other films from the same team. It's actually one of the better Emenegger sci-fi movies I've seen, purely because the campy, low budget nature of the production somehow works in the film's favour for a change.

The plot is a simple one which is quite reminiscent of modern-day horror fare: a group of strangers are captured by psychedelic aliens and experimented upon. A lot of the running time consists of their attempts to escape with the threat of medical surgery and worse hanging over them. In this respect it's a bit like a sci-fi version of a SAW film or maybe CUBE, although of course the script is nowhere near as intelligent.

The film features a leading role for action man Martin Kove, best known for his turn as the bad guy in THE KARATE KID. The special effects are unforgettable, particularly those 'glitter ball' alien costumes which reminded me of some of the trashy Italian gems that were being made during the same period. LABORATORY is a bad film for sure but somehow it keeps you watching and feels quite compelling in places.

Fortunately it seems that very few have endured this film as it's quite terrible. I love low budget Sci-Fi as very often they can be highly entertaining but this one is in a class of its own and not in a good way. The alleged "music" was torture as it consisted of tuneless electronic peeps and beeps and it would have been much better if the non musical soundtrack had been left out.

It was an interesting plot with the aliens testing the character etc. Of humans but this has been done so much better in some Star Trek TOS TV episodes.

The special effects were terrible and deserved to win some kind of award.

This is a low-budget sci-fi flick concerning an alien race snatching a small number of human beings out of their everyday existence in order to study their behaviour.

There are six humans in all, and although the characters interact quite well, they are rather clichéd stereotypes comprising the handsome hunk (Martin Kove, probably the most familiar face among this small cast), the shy, pretty blonde girl who falls for him, the technical expert who becomes the unofficial thinker/leader of the group, the spoilt wealthy woman more concerned with her own welfare than that of her companions and the older religious man who is convinced that all their problems can be solved by placing their faith in God. There is also a Southeast Asian woman (a token ethnic minority character?) who is killed off in somewhat bizarre circumstances very early on, presumably to heighten the tension and convince the viewer that the lives of the remaining quintet really are on the line.

After an initial sequence in which the various parties are each abducted from their home environment by means of a fireball-like phenomenon descending on them from the sky, most of the action takes place in the eponymous 'laboratory', which oddly resembles the interior of a rather squalid, abandoned government office building. Although this obviously saved on the budget, within the context of the film it is not made clear whether the aliens were recreating a familiar environment for their captives or had, in fact, merely transported them to a convenient place elsewhere on Earth. Occasional exterior shots of the facility would tend to favour the latter theory.

Perhaps it is explained at some point, unfortunately the aliens' speech, a synthesised effect not dissimilar to that of the Cylon voices in Battlestar Galactica, is difficult to follow, particularly since the overall sound and picture quality of this film is rather substandard. The aliens themselves are humanoid in shape but lack features and have skin resembling the surface of a disco glitterball.

The main thrust of the film is following the central characters, who are all initially unknown to one another, as they try to figure out what is going on and how they can escape their predicament. Cooperation would appear to be the key, however each has their own very firm idea as to how to proceed.

The premise is sufficiently strong to maintain viewer interest to the conclusion, although at times the behaviour of the characters seems to lack credibility. For example, one would imagine that the first course of action would be to explore the strange new environment they find themselves in, however it appears to be the case that they each go back to bed and have a night's sleep before doing so! The characters all suddenly becoming hysterical near the end seems forced in order to achieve a plot development rather than arising naturally.

The cheapness of the film often undermines plot developments. Whilst it is perfectly reasonable that it would be the woman with the musical background who is the character to learn how to use a sound machine to decode the aliens' language and communicate with them, that she is able to quickly achieve this with a machine capable of playing only six different musical notes and displaying the crudest of graphics seems far-fetched in the extreme.

Ah, I mentioned music. Probably the biggest failing of the film is the musical soundtrack. I use the term 'musical' in the loosest sense, because rather than being remotely tuneful, it is a continual (and I mean continual) bombardment of solemn chords that only serves to maintain a dismal atmosphere throughout rather than to enhance moments of drama or emotion.

It is a shame because even with its limited budget this film could have been so much more. I suspect it was a mistake to reveal the aliens too soon, and the mystery element could have been played up considerably by having the film start with one of the characters waking up in the laboratory with no idea of where they are or how they got there, and then following them as they encounter each of the others and trying to piece things together. As it is, the film rather clumsily gives us the answer first before asking the questions. Having said that, waiting an hour or more to see the aliens revealed only to then discover that they are the rather unimpressive beings depicted in this film would not be a very satisfying pay-off!

Overall then, this film is average at best. It has some nice ideas and will probably keep you watching in order to discover how everything pans out, but you will never once be fooled into believing you are watching a masterpiece, and it's unlikely that this is a film you would be in any hurry to return to again.

This was one of those Saturday afternoon movies that always played on my local TV station, which ran mostly obscure films and syndicated TV shows. "Laboratory" was one of the weirder ones that always popped up.

The exact plot is kind of fuzzy due to the passage of time, but I remember it opening with the abduction of several humans by an alien ship (or something). The budget wasn't really big on special effects, they staged a bunch of scenarios where the people were simply "beamed up" into the spaceship, i.e. they just disappeared while doing normal things like getting the newspaper from the driveway.

There was a cross-section of people who were abducted, although I really only remember a priest and an Asian woman. The humans were put through a number of tests like guinea pigs. A lot of the tests were mental, and it had to do with these human beings fighting and double-crossing one another while trying to escape the spaceship. For instance, there was one bitchy lady who wanted to hurt people. The priest came across this alien machine that shocked people and she somehow managed to trick him into "electrocuting" himself on it. But it's OK, in the end everyone was fixed, all the dead ones were revived, and the people were returned to the place of abduction as if nothing had ever happened, except for the Asian lady. Apparently they dissected her and couldn't put her back together again (or something).

I'm not sure, but I don't think they ever showed the aliens, either. I could be mistaken, but I think I remember wondering why they never did show what the aliens looked like.

Weird, to say the least, and a very obscure film, but one that I remember with a certain fondness for some reason. Must have been the beginnings of my affection for strange films.