Strange Invaders (1983)

One day, his ex-wife Margaret (Diana Scarwid) appears in the apartment of entomology docent Charles Bigelow (Paul Le Mat), their little daughter Elizabeth (Lulu Sylbert) in tow. There’s some sort of family problem, and she needs to return to the Midwest small town she grew up in. Charles agrees to take Elizabeth, of course, but when Margaret neither reappears nor phones for days, he and Elizabeth grow restless. After weeks have passed – a time during which all phone lines to the town Margaret is visiting are permanently unusable to boot – Charles decides to make the drive halfway around the country to find out what happened to his ex-wife.

Once he has arrived in beautiful Centerville, Illinois, things become increasingly peculiar. People there are rude, uninformative and  vaguely creepy, while the town itself still carries a heavy whiff of the 50s. More disturbing still is the fact that those people in town actually willing to talk to the stranger claim to never have heard of Margaret’s family. When Charles isn’t leaving immediately and pokes around the place a bit, the situation escalates in a not atypical series of events including a disappearing dog, a broke-down car, and mysteriously appearing and disappearing townsfolk. Eventually, Charles flees the town while a bug-eyed alien guy shoots lightning at his escape car.

Once returned to civilisation, our protagonist has a hell of a time finding anyone to believe him, be it friends, a lady from the government agency tasked with investigating strange occurrences (Louise Fletcher), or even tabloid reporter Betty Walker (Nancy Allen). And that really could be that, but these aliens clearly take security very seriously indeed, so Charles soon finds his home and office ransacked, and is threatened by various weird people. The aliens also start bothering Betty, finally winning Charles an ally as well as a love interest. Clearly, another visit to Centerville is in order.

As most people interested in cult cinema will probably know, what the 80s are to our era, the 50s were to the 80s themselves, with many a film taking heavy inspiration from pop cultural artefacts made thirty years earlier. As it is also today, this fixation can lead to a sort of lazy copyism, or to – often pretty inspired - reworkings that use elements of the old to make something new that uses looks, sounds and feelings of an earlier era and builds something different out of them.

Michael Laughlin’s Strange Invaders certainly belongs to the latter kind of film, using elements of 50s alien invasion movies, casting old school actors like June Lockhart and Kenneth Tobey (who turns out to be rather more excellent at being creepy than he ever was at being square-jawed), and including many an idea that could nearly have been borrowed from the past. At the same time, Laughlin does use many of these elements in ways the stiffer films of the 50s couldn’t have gotten away with, very companionably poking fun at the older films without anything here ever turning into outright satire or comedy. Rather, these moments in the film feel like nods for those in the audience who have seen the same films the filmmakers have.

There’s no heavy deconstruction of traditional genre tropes going on here anyway, mind you, for Laughlin’s really more interested in telling a traditional invasion plot in a slightly more contemporary manner, so if you expect a strong non-conformist subplot or something of the sort, you might be disappointed. Sometimes, an alien body snatcher is just an alien body snatcher rather than a metaphor for communism/anti-communism or whatever else floats your boat.

From a 2020 perspective, the film’s looking somewhat stranger than he will have played at the time, really giving me a bit of a double dose of nostalgia – one dose for the 50s movies the film itself feels a degree of nostalgia for, the other for the kind of mild 80s sf/horror this is, the sort of film made by filmmakers who shared many of the cultural influences and interests of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas but didn’t quite have the talent, or the luck, or the commercial instincts to make movies as accomplished or successful as these big boys of nerddom did.

Which doesn’t mean Laughlin’s a bad director. If you get used to Strange Invaders’ somewhat slow pace and are okay with a certain tendency to pull emotional punches where it would have been more effective to go for the gut, there’s a lot to enjoy here, starting with Louis Horvath’s typical (and very effective) early 80s photography (you’ll know pretty much how this will look if you have seen anything made in the first half of that decade; you’ll also know how pretty it looks), and certainly not ending with Laughlin’s love for tucking away little interesting details about characters somewhere in a scene’s background.

I’m also very happy about a film concerned with a deeply not macho Paul Le Mat as its hero, something that certainly wouldn’t have happened in the 50s (or quite a few parts of the 80s either). Le Mat’s not exactly a charisma bomb, but he plays his characters’ increasing frustration about the world’s disbelief as well as he shoes his deep well of courage when it comes down to it. From today’s perspective, Nancy Allen could really have rather more to do, but she’s also not standing around screaming all the time.

Last but not least, there is some really cool effects work on screen, with the ickily organic human masks in front of the also excellent alien faces as created by James Cummins being a particular high point; though the rest of the effects are lovely too.


All of which really adds up to a fun little film that evokes nostalgia without getting lost in it.

Virtuosity (1995)

Welcome to the weird and wacky near future of yesterday. Former cop Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) is serving a lengthy prison term for not only killing the terrorist and gang who had just murdered his wife and child but accidentally blowing away a couple of reporters too – and all this while missing an arm. I mention the arm so you don’t forget he now has a bionic arm he alas never uses like the Six Million Dollar Man did, but which will come in handy when the film’s climax needs to handwave away a bomb. Also, so you fully understand we are in the times of extra badass Denzel Washington here. Take that, Bruce Willis.

Anyway, Barnes has made a deal to shorten his sentence which results in him getting strapped into a VR machine thingy for some SCIENCE(!) business. In the VR world, he is pitted against evil AI SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe). SID isn’t just a sharp dresser in primary colours, we will later learn that his virtual brain is also fashioned after a couple hundred of history’s greatest mass murders and serial killers. Would you believe the guy who killed Barnes’s family is one of them? Now, you might ask yourself: what’s the point of the experiment at all? Why purposefully create an AI that’s basically The Joker? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure the film doesn’t know either.

But I digress into the realm of logic and sanity. At the same time, in the world of the movie, SID convinces his creator (I think, again, I’m not sure the film knows) to trick a hapless tech geek into building SID a body made of nanites so he can escape from Planet VR into the real world. Poor tech geek believes he is helping create a body for the sexy virtual chess program he is rather, ahem, fond of, by the way.

Obviously, SID really gets a body and manages to escape and goes on a bit of a rampage, composing a sampler symphony out of the screams of his victims. This is not a metaphor. Clearly, Barnes is the only one who can stop SID. Why? I have no idea, and neither has the script. Be that as it may, Barnes, for reasons unknown teamed up with psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch), is indeed promised his freedom if he manages to find and destroy SID.

Quickly, the film decides that it’s best that SID starts fixating on Barnes because the personality of the guy who killed Barnes’s family surfaces, and a duel of wits (I kid), guns and explosions ensues. There’s also a particularly idiotic subplot where SID successfully frames Barnes for murder, kidnapped children, and other assorted nonsense to witness.

Nominally, Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity wasn’t written by a drunken monkey, but looking at this assortment of plot holes so gigantic they are basically their own movie trilogy, ideas so stupid you’d be embarrassed to have come up with them, and a plot so plain idiotic I’m suddenly feeling rather good about myself, it’s probably best to pretend it actually was. Now, I love to go and on about the craziness of the Italian exploitation movie factories in the 70s and 80s, but Virtuosity is another proof that batshit crazy ideas were alive and well in mid-90s US mainstream action and (sort of) SF cinema, too.

In fact, Virtuosity’s sheer bizarre dumbness, the total insistence on having not a single scene or character that does make even a lick of sense during the whole course of this thing, would get it a proud place in the pantheon of Italian bullshit filmmaking. Only that comparable Italian productions would never have had the obvious nice and cosy budget this one cam throw at the screen, or been able to afford young Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, just on the cusp of biggest stardom.

Speaking of Washington, one of the best, and actually most insane, elements of the film is how much the man treats the whole mess of noise and nonsense surrounding him with utmost seriousness, apparently approaching this thing with the same sense of professionalism and style he’d use on a film with an actual script parsable by humans. There’s certainly no phoning in from Washington, which makes a delicious contrast to the total wackiness of his surroundings. Which nicely brings us to Crowe, also not phoning it in but actually chewing the scenery, the script and probably the air itself in a version of cartoonish evil murderous villainy that really would have suggested the man as a pretty great Joker for a Batman movie. It’s really a joy to watch these guys doing their very contrasting respective things, putting effort into every dumb thing the script throws at them.

They are assisted in this effort by a cast of a dozen or so character actors and cult film favourites like Lynch, William Forsythe, Louise Fletcher, William Fichtner, and so on and so forth, all of whom are of course game for any stupid shit.


So, despite being dumber than a rock, Virtuosity is just great fun to watch, its wacky and wrong ideas flying at you without pause, with a good handful of highly professionally and effectively realized action sequences adding even more joy to the affair. It’s always very clear the film did have a decent budget, too, so its misguided and improbable ideas about the near future, humanity, the way anything in real life works, and life itself, are realized in lovely sharp colours, shot with style and edited with verve. And of course, the contrast between the batshit craziness of it all and the slickness of its surface adds another layer of charm to Virtuosity, turning this into quite the experience.