Skot managed to get out to a movie theatre and catch WALL-E; me, I been busy. Okay, not so much, but I’m not going to surround myself with kids under any circumstances, no matter how good the movie is. And anyway, I managed to get my paws on something that I had long considered the worst movie ever made. I have since decided that estimation was callow and naive - it is, however, probably the worst movie ever RELEASED.

When I was growing up, there was a clearly designed hierarchy to movies on television. The best of the best played in theaters, then five years later they’d show up on one of the major networks. Another five years and they’d go to the local stations. Some product wasn’t that good though and it would just bypass the networks and go straight to the locals. Often local stations would buy a package of movies. There’d be three or four big movies in the package, and another ten that never made it to the networks, and then the package would be rounded out with four or five movies that NOBODY wanted. They’d throw ‘em in just for numbers sake, and to amortize the cost of these unwanted features. The stations would show them, if at all, very late at night or anywhere that they had a hole on the schedule that they had already given up on. These movies were alternatives to dead air.

And surely that was the circumstance behind my sole viewing of INVASION FROM INNNER EARTH, which ran one weekday afternoon on Channel 8 in Salinas. It’s a Canadian science fiction story, made in 1973, taking place mostly in an isolated cabin in the middle of the woods, eh? The very cheap look of it was what caught my eye at first - clumsy cutting, drab sets, good-looking but unmotivated actors. You know what? I don’t have to describe it. You can watch it here. The rights lapsed on it and now it’s a free download on Archive.org. That’s right, INVASION FROM INNER EARTH is officially worthless.

I say you can watch it, but you won’t. You may try. But one of the things that makes it such a bad movie is the phenomenal lack of narrative drive. Here’s the story. Somehow, the world is ending. everywhere people are mysteriously dying across the globe. Aliens are clearly involved. Since this premise is a challenge to convey with a limited budget, the filmmakers focus on a pilot and some scientists who land in a remote area and struggle with their increased isolation. They can’t get anyone on the radio, they can’t get anyone on the phone, and now and then they are scanned by a mysterious red light which looks suspiciously just like a flashlight beam with a gel over it.

Now and then they get a radio message from a guy who claims he’s human, but he has a very deep voice with a heavy reverb on it. Oh, and he speaks in a monotone. There are intimations that he may, in fact, be the alien.

I think the only reason this hasn’t gotten the cult following that PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE has is because it’s almost no fun. Say what you will about PLAN 9, there is at least never a dull moment. They jump from one bad scene to another. INVASION (originally titled THEY, incidentally) is hilariously static. It’s funny the same way a Mike Meyers gag is funny. You know how Dr. Evil tells his kid to Zip it, and then there is a five minute scene where Scott Evil tries to talk and Dr. Evil comes up with dozens and dozens of variations on the term “zip it?” The gag is funny at first because he’s telling his kid to shut up, then it’s funny because he repeats, then it’s not funny, then it’s funny because he’s sitll doing it, then he’s still doing it and that’s hysterical.

In INVASION, a character boldly decides to take the snowmobile to try to find civilization, and the next three minutes are long shots of him riding the snowmobile, with library music blaring over it all. Believe me, if you’re on the right wavelength (you can take drugs if it helps you get there) then this sequence is twice as funny as Dr. Evil. 

The pleasure I get from watching this movie is pure schadenfreude. Every passing minute I think, OMG! They actually thought they were getting away with this! The whole 90 minutes, structurally, is that snowmobile scene. Then it culminates in a finale which I couldn’t put in words if I wanted to, but suffice to say it’s not a disappointing non sequitur only because there would have to be an alternate satisfying ending and believe me, it wasn’t comin’.

You kind of have to appreciate the way that good movies are constructed to enjoy the wrong choices this one makes. Read your Syd Field, your Joseph Conrad, your Robert McKee before watching INVASION FROM INNER EARTH. Otherwise, you won’t know what it’s missing, and it will just be a joke without a punch line.

-daniel k.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under General, Motion Pictures, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.