Invaders From Mars releases on April 7 from Scream Factory.
Invaders From Mars occupies an odd space in the Tobe Hooper canon. Produced through Cannon Film schlock merchants Golan and Globus, the film isn’t one of Hooper’s unassailable masterpieces (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) nor does it seem to derive the sort of cult adulation that greets the likes of Lifeforce, Funhouse, Eaten Alive, All The Nudity In Lifeforce, or even Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. While there does seem to be affection for Invaders out there, it’s usually talked about more as a curiosity than anything else.
Having now seen Invaders From Mars, thanks to the new Blu-ray from Scream Factory, a curiosity is indeed what it is. While nowhere near as terrible as you might assume given the canon of Cannon Films (and a good deal more coherent than Hooper’s other collaboration with Golan and Globus, Lifeforce), Invaders From Mars is never as good as the various talent behind and in front of the camera suggests it might have been. Invaders, then, is that ultimate frustration: the near-miss. The OK movie in which you can see the outline of a truly great one.
The film opens with a giant flying saucer touching down in the backyard of young David Gardner (Hunter Carson). Already the film is hitting false notes, since opening with such a big, dazzling lightshow leaves it very little place to go (basically, imagine if Poltergeist had started with the crazy ghost-puppet stuff). But, anyway, no one else sees the gigantic flying saucer touch down, and the next morning David finds that his father (who went to go check out David’s report) has an odd mark on the back of his neck and is behaving strangely. It’s not long before more and more people are showing the tell-tale mark and displaying bizarre behavior. David ends up teaming up with school nurse Linda Magnusson (Karen Black, Carson’s real-life mother) to escape the alien threat and alert the army.
There’s something primal and affecting about the notion of everyone in your life being replaced, about having the people you love and trust the most become unrecognizable behind familiar faces, and the early acts of Invaders From Mars do a solid job at playing to that source of fear. The sense that the whole world is unknowable and potentially malicious is most keenly felt when you’re a child and are literally powerless, and it is no accident that the people who first undergo the change are all authority figures within David’s life. His parents, his teacher, the teacher’s pet, these are all individuals that represent challenges and obstacles just in day to day living, never mind if they are suddenly being mind-controlled by an evil, otherworldy sentience.
But, as unfailing as that set-up seems, Hooper still whiffs, and he whiffs big. His biggest failing as director is an absolute inability to establish a believable reality before the aliens hit home. The opening scenes of David hanging out with his parents are so arch, so false, so lacking any palpable chemistry between people ostensibly supposed to be in a happy family together, that nothing that happens after has any weight. And when David’s father gets zapped, his behavior is so wildly, laughably gross and nonsensical that there’s no real tension. Having him play it so broad makes the same mistake as opening the movie with the most expensive special effect: it gives the remainder of the film no room to escalate.
Carson makes an interesting lead for the movie, lacking the movie-kid-cute artificiality that makes so many of these sort kid-centric genre movies unbearable. While he has no shortage of awkward lien readings, there is a certain authenticity to the way he plays fear and confusion that a more traditional casting choice might’ve missed out on (and obviously playing most of the movie opposite his mom probably made that relationship that much easier to play). Black is actually excellent in the movie, really digging into the material and selling the shit out of the various effects. You can’t just throw plastic and rubber and goo at the screen and expect it to work as it is, you need to have people on camera who can palpably interact with the fantastic elements. Black is asked to handle the lion’s share of this responsibility, and she truly does create palpable emotional reactions to the nonsense going on. Of course, being a woman, she spends the last chunk of the movie tied up, unconscious, and then uselessly screaming her head off. What you gonna do.
I’d be lying if I said that there weren’t aspects of this movie that appeal on a fetishistic level. Not in the sense that I get my jollies from toothy space aliens (not that I’m not not saying that. Not that I’m not not not saying that. Not that I’m not not, look, go judge someone else) but just that there’s something about this era of genre film that I love on a chemical level. Movies like The Fly, The Thing, Night of the Creeps, Near Dark, hell, even turkeys like C.H.U.D. or Wolfen have appeal just on the strength of the sort of locations they used, the sort of film stock and effects material, the sort of actors that were called on. Invaders From Mars doesn’t belong very high on those rankings, but there’s something wonderful about the emphasis on mood, on the HUGE practical sets for the alien ship and the big, Stan Winston-designed monsters. So just as a fan of this style of film, I found a lot to like in the surface details of the film.
But those surface pleasures only make me more frustrated at how Hooper squanders the film on a narrative and subtextual level. I’m sure there’s a reason behind it (Golan and Globus tended to be, ahem, somewhat prone to creative accounting) but the finished project is a film that never really finds its footing and spends far too much time at the end spinning its wheels through repetitive action, tied up in an ending that just plain fucking sucks. Hooper tried to do to the suburbs with aliens what he’d already done with ghosts, but the end results only highlight what a wonderful bit of alchemy Poltergeist was, and how even with a great number of resources and smart people, some films just refuse to spark to life.
Seriously though, the big aliens are really cool looking.