Invasion From Inner Earth (1974)

the leading man is my tpye

It is so daring, it is so ambitious, it is so thrilling and weird and pointed and powerful. I never knew where it was going.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Without a doubt, one of the worst films I have ever seen. Every aspect of it is rotten: the cast, the acting, the music, the editing, the script...It wants to be a sci-fi/horror movie, but fails miserably. The "alien" takes the form of a red flashlight beam. There are many intercuts of people in a city frantically running away from colored smoke that is pouring from containers on the ground; the shots are re-used several times, and are inserted seemingly at random.The soundtrack is just a collection of library music. During one long scene, the music was too short, so it just stopped. Several seconds later, the snippet started again, played through, and then stopped. Seconds later, it was back...kind of like someone lifting the tone-arm from a vinyl record and replacing it at the beginning of a track.The cast mainly sits around a cabin in the snowy woods and talks aimlessly about what has happened. No one knows. Except that, maybe, Earth and Mars were once very close together and the Martians escaped to Earth and went underground, only to reappear as red flashlight beams 2000 years later.At the end, the last two survivors walk along snowy railroad tracks and then -- in the next shot -- become naked children skipping and frolicking through fields of flowers.Then the credits roll.And I am NOT making this up.

Apparently, after a worldwide search for the perfect script writer, director Bill Rebane happened upon a little known writer named Barbara J. Rebane to pen his vision. Where he discovered her is unknown to me, but the two of them created magic together.She took two bold steps in this film, one original and one copied later with a much higher budget.First, she broke the survivor-typecast protocol that most writers would dare not violate. Rather than give longevity to the handsome brooding Native American or the outdoorsy Canadian, she gives the nod to the chunky, bearded, bespectacled cretin in the Sherlock Holmes hat. Under normal circumstances, this type of character would be lighting his own gas in the corner of the room while the others formulate a plan and then meet with an untimely, yet slightly humorous death. Rebane, on the other hand, even gives this guy the girl.The other place where she unwittingly deserves credit is for utilizing the aliens-under-the-ground scenario for a lot less money than Tom Cruise probably paid for his "War of the Worlds" travesty. I'd be curious to know whether she got a "based on an idea by" or an "inspired by" credit in Cruise's film.PS - despite the fact that I consider these two areas worthy of compliment, I am in no way recommending anyone actually watch this movie.

Six people are doing some research in a Canadian cabin. On the flight back they try to land at an airstrip, only to be shooed away by the one person left at the airport. The characters of the movie go back to the cabin to speculate what it all means. Is it a virus? An alien invasion? Both? They don't know. Unfortunately, because of lousy storytelling and incompetent directing the viewer isn't sure either. One thing is for sure. The next part of the movie will bore you to tears as uninteresting people mull around a boring cabin for the rest of the film.Again, a movie with good premise is horribly botched by Rebane. The sheer isolation and lack of information that the characters have could make for a very psychological thriller. Personality types could be explored in this setting. Tension could build leading to a dramatic climax. It doesn't happen. In all fairness to Rebane, his film the Alpha Incident does a nice job of this.So, what we are left with is a dwindling population of protagonists as they are, for some reason, disappearing. Finally, three are left. They hike to some town(Rhinelander, WI). Figure that out. I'm no Lewis and Clark but I think there's something closer to Canada. One more guy vanishes and we are left with Stan and Sara. And that's when the movie gets worse, if that's possible. For some reason they are turned into naked children and transported to a springtime meadow. I don't get it. Rebane probably didn't either, but hey, we need an ending.I usually enjoy the Bill Rebane films in spite of the their shortcomings, but this one was very hard to get through. The alien effects were terrible, even for 1974. The characters weren't bad but they were badly acted. The scenery was nice, so I guess there's that.Even if you like Rebane(I'm sure there's more crazy people like me), this one just doesn't hold up.

The very opening shots of They, aka Invasion from Inner Earth, aka The Selected, aka Hell Fire, aka your mama (well, not the last one), has lots of people running around, apocalypse raging. This is obviously from another movie, as the producers of the film rarely have enough of a budget for Wonder bread inbetween the takes for the actors much less staging a big epic cluster-f***. Right after these shots, which look made for a promising movie it cuts to the Wisconsin (or Canadadian?) wilderness, where some guys are flying in a plane. But there's also a crazy guy flying a plane who crashes in the woods. The four guys see this and investigate. But there's more than they bargained for: all communication with the outside world is cut-off, except to a pretty girl with a radio in her cabin one of the guy's knows. Then a red light coming out of a flashlight is buzzing around the room- the alien, of course- and now there are ominous callings on the radio.Spooky? Moreover inept, really, though it's not without a certain allotment of watchability (unless it's late at night, which might make it a good movie to fall asleep to, or to fool around with the significant other). But it's also so cheaply shot that anything that could possibly be in the script is obfuscated by the meandering take of the material. 'We need aliens' should've been as a protest on t-shirts during the making of the film! Instead it's done in a style that elimintates the middle-man, or middle-martian, so that Ito (yes, a director called Ito, who in reality directed one of the worst films ever Monster-a-go-go) can get many shots of outside in the wilderness and so-so scripted fighting in the cabin. I don't even remember if I made it all the way through to the end. Looks like They don't get very far with this stuff- the filmmakers, I mean. At least the stock music is cool.