UFO: Target Earth (1974)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The abysmal rating this film has is completely undeserved, if you view it in the context of other UFO films of that period and in the context of SF films generally. You cannot tell me that Spielberg and those guys didn't watch this film before they did the big extravaganza, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, three years later. This film has a low budget, and the characters and the plot are poorly developed. It also contains a closing scene that is a pathetic attempt to emulate Kubrick's masterful SF film -- I know, I know. But, it's not in the IMDb 2 range. It deserves more -- not a whole lot more, but a little more. It's a fun film to watch on a Saturday afternoon, if you have nothing else to do and you can manage to keep your expectations suitably low.

UFO: Target Earth (1974) BOMB (out of 4) Incredibly stupid and silly sci-fi flick about a dorky young man who starts to investigate UFO's and then hears strange noises coming from a local lake where it was reported decades earlier that a spaceship crashed. This is a really stupid and really, really silly little film that doesn't have a single thing going for it. The movie runs under 80-minutes and for the life of me a story never starts. The film opens with various locals talking about their encounters with UFOs but even these stories are boring and what follows just gets even worse. The acting is off the map bad as is the direction and I swear my 3-year-old cousin could have came up with better dialogue. And let's not even talk about the special effects. The one interesting thing is that the ending somewhat resembles Close Encounters of the Third Kind and knowing Spielberg loves these types of films I'm rather curious if he had seen this or been influenced by it.

Terrible film, suffered from not just being long, and boring, but it appeared it was some kind of 16mm film, made by college students on a shoestring budget and transferred to 35mm-not an uncommon practice at the time for low-budget films, turned into potboilers for drive-in 2nd features. I remember it was "hyped" as a docudrama and double billed with The Devil's Triangle, another documentary that was narrated by Vincent Price and was at least,entertaining but both cashed in on,in then-1974, hype over UFOs and Bermuda Triangle lore. The plot is basically an electronics expert determines that strange signals may be coming from a rural area where he grew up-and a possible UFO crash site- at the bottom of a lake. The ship crashed possibly many years ago and it's occupants-or their psychic energies- have apparently been alive all that time and been attempting to communicate. An old-timer recalls when he was a boy, a "star falling into the lake". We never really see anything but an attempt is made to create a creepy, "too quiet" lake in many shots. The whole thing reeks of poor film-making-everyone in one shot, talking-lots of glib talking- as if they are reading the script, and extremely poor FX(what there are of them). Most seem to be just video tricks such as high contrast/video blending images of the alien's face on a monitor and a cheap bit of animation showing a ship in space-something like a dime store 2001. Interesting opening titles sequence with a strange but catchy electro-smooth "70's sounding" song called "Between The Attic and The Sky" and a montage of UFO photos we have all seen before. Everything is shot at night, or in a perpetual sunset-across-the-lake mode. This film oddly had a huge play in many areas in 1974, and wound up as a prime-time TV syndicated film the next year in many markets.

Aside from a really cool title and a neato disco UFO trip movie opening titles sequence, this movie sucks. Ever hear of a movie called BOG about a swamp monster that goes on the rampage and starts tearing apart ply-board movie sets? BOG is a better movie that UFO: TARGET EARTH. Ever seen Larry Buchanan's ZONTAR, THING FROM VENUS? ZONTAR: THING FROM VENUS is a better movie than UFO: TARGET EARTH.I very fondly remember the UFO craze that gripped Amercia around the time of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, and while a bit early (1974) this film is surely a part of that craze. There were a bunch of faux documentary films on UFOs & other worldly phenomenon at about the same time -- my favorite will always be IN SEARCH OF NOAH'S ARK -- and I was kind of hoping this would be one of them. It isn't, and the last 20 minutes of TV blending feedback color head trip space junk might be great free-form visual expression, but please.I wish I could be kinder on this film: The only UFOs you see are still photos used for the opening credits, which I come back to again as the high point of the film. I suppose if you were zonked out of your mind on blotter acid this might be somewhat engaging, it has a sort of naive earnestness about itself that is charming in a slack-jawed kind of way. I also dig the cheapo 70s interiors, editing room (literally) production design, and the idea of trying to make a movie about UFOs that essentially consists of people sitting around talking about them, followed by endless sequences of pre CAD or Apple Mac computer renderings instead of showing us space aliens. Kind of like the end of 2001 (complete with an ambiguous close-up of a star person's eye) but without all the fuss & bother involved with getting us there.Something tells me also that the three 8/10 votes dragging this movie's user ratings curve up to 4/10 are in on the plot to deprive target audience viewers of a film with a name like UFO: TARGET EARTH of 83 minutes of their life that could be spent doing constructive things like playing golf, masturbating, or strangling small animals.3/10; I did just raise it a point after reconsidering the movie. It's awful but then again like eating snails, awful movies can be an acquired taste. Try lemon butter sauce, or better yet a case of beer.