| BAD
XMAS PARTY AT THE BAD FILM SOCIETY
To
celebrate the worst aspect of the holidays, we will
have a white elephant
gift exchange. Bring something trashy that you can't
wait to get rid of. Of course, we will also have
a special holiday edition of our pot luck dinner.
This is the best community dinner in Ashland! Bring
a
holiday-scrumptious dish! A treat for connoisseurs
of enjoyably bad films.
Our
feature, Invisible Invaders from 1959 is
one of the worst of all the Invisible Monster genre
films and has absolutely nothing to do with Santa
Claus. The grandiose plot managed to bring together
elements of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Night of
The Living Dead. Aliens attempt to conquer Earth
by inhabiting human corpses and overwhelming the
living. The entire world is thrown into chaos almost
overnight. A tiny group of researchers holed up
in a hidden cave lab have to overcome interpersonal
problems to emerge with an effective ray gun to
combat the armies of the dead.
Ponderous
narration and mismatched and crudely-edited stock
footage of natural disasters, airplane crashes,
etc., fail to bring any of it life.
John Carradine plays a dead scientist reanimated
by the aliens to
inexplicably warn a colleague about the menace.
He's just the first in an uninterrupted stream of
indigestible events. John Agar’s career hits
rock bottom.
The
most memorable visual is the odd spectacle of a
half-dozen zombie
automatons stumbling down a sagebrush hill. Every
time the narrator
mentions the mounting hordes of the dead overwhelming
the world, we cut
back to the same angle of the same 6 zombies, walking
arms outstretched,
down the same hill.
The
big question is "Why do these aliens have to
use corpses to do
things?" In a few scenes, they seem physically
capable enough to
achieve their goals without the hindrance of rigor
mortis, and you'd think
invisibility would have more tactical value than
looking creepy. And why
do they all talk like John Carradine?
|
