jlnight wrote:
Invaders from Mars, the Tobe Hooper version, starts Weds 13th September, Horror.
I finally caught up with this! I’ve had a strange history with this film as I have really strong memories of my mum renting it when I was really young (7 or 8, around the time the film was first out on VHS in the late 80s) and then turning it off in disgust part way through. Not at the infamous shot of Louise Fletcher eating the frog (though I remember that didn’t go down well!), but the shot of the alien probes coming out of the back of a couple of soldier’s necks that actually occurs late on in the final section of the film. That was my mother’s breaking point but stopping the film at that point, combined with never having seen the film again for almost thirty years, seared that image into my memory! So let this be a warning to parents of potentially traumatised young children – let the horror play out and deal with it after the film is finished, as shutting off an alien invasion film in the middle with no resolution only makes the imagery even more powerful! Having now seen the film through to the end, it would have made far less of a lasting impact than the partial childhood viewing did! For one thing it is impossible to take this remake seriously at all, even if tonally the goofiness (like its day-glo companion piece Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) is the most disturbing thing about it!
Its all a bit off-kilter from the very beginning as the opening titles do a blatant and borderline litigious riff on the Superman title sequence. It did make me think that those single titles whoosing past are probably the most slow and laborious (not to mention bombastic and pretentious) way to do an opening credit sequence ever devised! Just about acceptable in the first Superman film, but for little after that (though I’ve always been partial to
Supergirl’s opening credits, with its jaunty theme tune!) No wonder many modern films don’t bother with them anymore! As with so much in the film (set design, performances) it is played straight-faced but one-note and amped up/drawn out to such an extent that it feels completely unrealistic (which of course anticipates the final act twist!).
It seems as though it would have been fun to do all of the acting in this. Everyone chews the scenery with gusto, from Louise Fletcher’s harridan of a teacher constantly raising suspicion of her alien status even without the frog sequence by barging into the nurse’s office and demanding that the recalcitrant child “be handed over immediately”! Karen Black’s ‘heroine’ of the film is almost completely useless, even at running about and screaming, almost like a parody of a dim-witted heroine in peril! James Karen plays an army general who similarly is reduced to screaming at various members of the cast not to stupidly run into the quicksand, only for them to do just that! (Watching this reminded me of how good James Karen is in supporting roles in many films, even currently. I always enjoy his presence, and while he’s as strident as anyone else in this film, it was fun to be reminded of his much better frantic role as the supervisor seeing events snowball around him in Return of the Living Dead!). There’s even the stereotype of the quisling figure in the form of a bratty little girl with pigtails who is
obviously the true monster of the film!
The parents turning into creepy weirdos is probably the most disturbing element though. Its there in the (much, much better) 1953 original film too, but the way that remake lingers on scenes just a bit too long for comfort (very similar to the radio station terrorisation scenes in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), where its blatantly obvious that the dad is now an alien if it wasn’t already from the very first moment, adds a, perhaps unintentional, underlying theme of child abuse to the action, where both parent and child are trapped in superficial normality but both are obviously aware of the unspoken truth being imperfectly hidden beneath that façade. That paranoid feeling is there in the teachers and police too, but of course its heightened when living in the same house!
That is part of the tonal shift from the original film that makes this 1986 version so disturbing even whilst it is so ludicrously over the top and throwing in special effect sequences all over the place (where the spectacular light show of an alien ship visitation equivalent to the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind occurs in your back yard, yet apparently nobody else is blinded by the light, or even woken up by it!) that make the metaphorically creepy bluntly and unavoidably explicit. I keep coming back to comparing Invaders From Mars to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but it seems impossible to see them apart from each other as they’re both ‘crudening’ (or Cannon Film-ing!) effective original horror pieces into bluntly disturbing comic pieces (you could even throw LifeForce in there too, as a more special effect laden take on a Quatermass film, though I think that’s the only film of the three that stands up in its own right)
I think that ‘explicitness’ is probably what made my mum turn the film off all those years ago more than anything else. The idea that there was no subtlety on display but instead everything visualised in bright colour and latex right there on screen, with the alien tentacle probe thingies appearing out of the back of the soldier’s necks after they are killed being sort of the last straw for her! I can sympathise to some extent with that, but that kind of ‘visualisation of the previously unseen’ as well as general special effect laden ‘body horror’ element is all over 1980s cinema (for example my mum always
loved the remakes of The Thing and The Fly, and who would disagree! But they were both also doing the 'explicitly special effects visualised remaking of a 1950s original' approach, albeit with a bit more skill and a less abrasive tone!), and I am kind of growing to appreciate these mid-80s Tobe Hooper Cannon Films as charting sort of the extreme edge of that kind of trend.
The Invaders From Mars remake is too goofy to really appeal to adults, yet still quite disturbing in its off-kilter sense of atmosphere to really work as kid fare too (plus there’s a bit of swearing in there too from some of the main character’s classmates, which luckily the Horror Channel left in despite the early afternoon timeslot!). Like the original version of the story (and Invasion of the Body Snatchers), its all about the ultimate childhood nightmare of losing the protection of parents and other authority figures, even being about to fundamentally betrayed by them before you wake up to the danger just in time. But getting woken up to the danger leaves you in a horrible new uncertain world where many of your previous colleagues and classmates have themselves been changed sides and joined the new regime, and suddenly
you’re the alien in your own community! The 80s remake pushes that theme to such an extent that even when the heroes mount a fight back they seem to succeed more by luck than judgement and with a
lot of unnecessary screaming and shouting, arms flailing and running about! But (and this is where I think my mum turning the film off with just twenty minutes to go did the wrong thing in searing the story into my memory without any conclusion!) there is time paid in the climax to ‘save’ the parents from the alien mind control and make sure that they are OK (which weirdly makes this more of a ‘feel good’ film in the end than many of the bleaker 1950s B-movies that it is supposedly updating for the modern day!). Maybe if I had seen that finale as a child, I would have relaxed and entirely forgotten about ever seeing this film!
Then of course there’s the de rigueur “Phew! It was all a dream. Oh no, it was actually a premonition! The cycle is starting all over again!” ending.
While I think that I will always vastly prefer the 1953 original over it (whereas with the Body Snatchers films say, I think I like the 50s, 70s, even the slightly iffy 90s versions just as much as each other), but it is not a total mess and is expressing a particular point of view, especially if viewed from either a Cannon Films or ‘Tobe Hooper as auteur’ perspective (the family unit here looks especially cartoony compared to the perfectly realised family unit in Poltergeist, or even the first Texas Chain Saw Massacre film!).
Plus, of course, it has got Louise Fletcher emoting wildly with the back legs of a frog wobbling about in her mouth, so there’s at least one unforgettable image in there!
Login
Register
FAQ
