File Under WTF? Part 2
Caution: Spoilers ahead!
Allan Reed: Mrs. Arlyn, for the past five years I've been traveling, investigating every phenomenon from alien astronauts to Atlantis to the Bermuda Triangle, even Bigfoot. I'm a scientist... I'm an astronomer.
Mrs. Arlyn: Really?
Allan Reed: Well, an unemployed astronomer.
After recently re-watching the obscure, nigh forgotten sci-fi flick
The Alien Encounters (1979) written and directed by James T. Flocker--creator of the previously reviewed and similarly deranged
Ghosts That Still Walk (1977)--I was happy to know that I was NOT hallucinating for the past several decades when a fuzzy childhood memory would occasionally bubble up from the depths of my brain of once upon a time watching a film on TV about a silver spherical alien probe named Charlie that hovers around the desert, observing a scientist and teenage boy hiking near the Devil's Tower-like Eagle Rock as they search for the Betatron, a machine to prolong human life invented by the boy's late scientist father.
With its pre-CGI practical special effects and 1970s trappings, sitting down and watching this possibly made-for-TV movie again was like taking a time machine back to another era, long before high definition televisions, Blu-ray discs, YouTube, Netflix, or home theater in general existed and before infomercials took over the late night airwaves, an era when in order not to miss a favorite movie on one of just a handful of channels, you had to possess luck or a highlighted copy of TV Guide, along with a strong aerial antenna mounted on the roof to coax down those distant, fuzzy UHF station signals. The Alien Encounters is the quintessential type of late night UHF movie that you could have once stumbled upon at 2:30 in the morning without ever knowing exactly what the hell you were watching, and then possibly never see again. Like the fictitious sci-fi B-movie Flaming Globes of Sigmund that Jerry groggily half remembers in an episode of Seinfeld, The Alien Encounters is a film I possessed only hazy memories of watching once or twice as a kid growing up in the NY/NJ/PA tri-state area back in the early 1980s--probably casually watched after the CBS Late Movie or on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon--but I could never really remember the title or many pertinent details until I recently purchased an Australian PAL VHS copy on eBay.
Without wanting to get into spoilers too much, I’ll just say that if you're an aficionado of such speculative pseudo-documentary 1970s fare like In Search of…, Overlords of the UFO, Hangar 18 or Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot, you should find The Alien Encounters right up your alley. I’ll admit the film can be a bit talky and poky compared with the seizure inducing editing of current action films, and in fact it really comes across as less of a fictional narrative sci-fi flick than a leisurely paced true-life nature documentary from some parallel universe; with its talk of intelligent signals beamed to Earth from Barnard’s Star, I’m almost convinced it was The Alien Encounters and not The Man Who Fell to Earth that was the real cinematic inspiration behind Philip K. Dick’s 1981 movie-within-a-novel VALIS.
Overlooking the amateur home movie quality of the overall production and obvious ultra low budget special effects, the only major nitpicks I have with the film are that some sequences could have used some tightening up in the editing room, but that said I still found this flick strangely endearing, even occasionally hypnotic—an early scene depicts astronomer Allan Reed (Augie Tribach) as he tries valiantly to flip a switch on a massive mainframe computer terminal amid smoke and fire after electromagnetic interference from a nearby UFO disastrously causes his radio telescope to explode. This sequence comically goes on for at least a minute too long and practically seems lifted from Airplane! or one of the Naked Gun movies, as Reed keeps…reaching…for that…switch that’s just…slightly…out…of…reach. I will admit I laughed out loud with--but not at, never at--this particular scene. And though you can occasionally see the wire that keeps Charlie the little silver spheroid alien probe floating aloft in the desert, scenes with the probe and others when a large flying saucer slowly hovers over the desert landscape with a low subsonic rumble are fairly convincing considering the size of the budget director James T. Flocker had making this film was probably just a mere fraction Steven Spielberg had at his disposal for the big budget Close Encounters of the Third Kind produced a couple years earlier.
All caveats aside, Flocker’s UFO conspiracy flick still manages to evoke occasional moments of sheer otherworldly weirdness. There’s a genuinely creepy flashback about twenty minutes in as Elaine Stafford (Bonnie Henry), a young woman interviewed by the now unemployed astronomer, recounts her sighting of what she originally thought a ghost, but has come to believe was actually an extraterrestrial after reading the late Dr. Arlyn’s book while researching the paranormal. As Stafford slowly walks down the stairs towards her encounter with the unknown, an atmosphere of unease builds as the camera focuses on a close-up of a round, suspiciously UFO-shaped chandelier at the bottom of the stairs (a shot similar to one David Lynch would use a decade later in Twin Peaks when focusing on the seemingly mundane ceiling fan at the top of the stairs outside the late Laura Palmer’s bedroom door to evoke a sense that not all was as it seemed in the Palmer house). The faces of creepy cherubic statues are inter-cut with the girl descending the stairs as the sound of agitated birds in the night increases, recalling the preternatural call of the whippoorwill that presages death and cosmic horror in H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Dunwich Horror. And like Bruce the shark in the first half of Jaws or the xenomorph in most of Alien, the creature in this sequence is never clearly seen by the viewer, but is only hinted at in brief snippets as it slowly turns to face the hapless human as she reaches the bottom of the stairs; one can almost make out a type of bestial face that looks as though it stepped out of a medieval wood carving of the devil, the only details discernible are that the thing's puffy head appears crowned with a pair of antennae and it possesses three or more eyes. The soundtrack builds to a hypnotic drone as the girl comes face to face with the alien, and the final shot of the thing is so dark and obscured (certainly not helped by the low quality VHS transfer I viewed) that one can only perceive what looks like some kind of strange insectoid shape, glistening like wet, black leather as Elaine screams in terror and then collapses. I thought it was a truly effective scene and one that I immediately recalled watching and being frightened of so many years ago as a kid, and in my opinion is one of the real highlights of this film.
A couple other minor observations: a good decade before
The X-Files and the later
Men in Black,
The Alien Encounters might be one of the earliest--if not the first--motion picture to feature both the concept of animal mutilations and the mysterious Men in Black from UFO lore, though instead of driving around in a black Cadillac, the “Mibs” as they’re called in this film cruise around in a gray cargo van and rock dark aviator glasses and porn ‘staches; there's even a car chase thrown in during the climax of the film involving Dr. Allan Reed's beat up station wagon and the Men in Black's sinister gray van, accompanied musically by a requisite 1970s electro-funk groove to emphasize the action. I also noticed one of the scenes in the desert was scored with what I think are several minutes of music from the Capitol Records Hi-Q stock music library that anyone familiar with the episode "Inside the Closet" from
Tales from the Darkside will recognize; I’m not familiar with the title or composer but it’s great--spacey, atmospheric and just overall creepy sounding.*
*UPDATED 1/29/15: That fantastic library track is apparently entitled "Underwater Shadows" by the prolific stock music composer William George "Bill" Loose. Thanks YouTube copyright infringement lawyer-bots!
Here's a short clip:
It seems surly teenager Steve Arlyn (Matt Boston) presumably shops at the same “Ye Olde Orange Life Preserver Vest Shoppe” at Twin Pines Mall since he dresses eerily similar to Marty McFly in Back to the Future just a few years later.
James T. Flocker’s The Alien Encounters was obviously an ultra low budget labor of love by its director, cast, and crew and yet it still manages to effectively capture an atmosphere of otherworldly alien-ness, due in part to the natural desert landscape used for a majority of the setting, but also because this is a film that is chock-a-block full of ideas, even if those ideas presented through the dialogue and documentary-like narration are frequently wackadoodle and occasionally just bugnuts crazy. However, I loved this movie and think this film is way past due for a re-release and re-evaluation of its shaggy, 1970s charm on DVD or Blu-ray, even if it’s just in one of those 50-public-domain-movies-for-$20 collections. I’m not sure why The Alien Encounters has practically fallen off the face of the Earth and is nearly unknown in this day and age when pretty much everything else imaginable--good, bad or otherwise--is available in one form or another, either as an official release or uploaded to YouTube…
...unless that’s just the way the “Mibs” want it to stay.
Allan Reed: What's a "Mib"?
Steve Arlyn: Men in black... my dad called them "Mibs". It's a... code name. They're guys who showed up after UFO sightings asking a lot of questions, with really no reason.
Allan Reed: Steve, your father was being watched by somebody, wasn't he?
[Pause] Who?
Steve Arlyn: For years before he died... my dad was being followed by the men in black.
Allan Reed: What project was he working on?
Steve Arlyn: Betatron.
Note: Earlier versions of this review appeared previously on
imdb.com and
classichorrorfilmboard.com.
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