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| Cannon Film Distributors | Release Date: June 6, 1986 |
Starring:
Bud Cort, Christopher Allport, Donald Hotton, Eric Pierpoint, Hunter Carson, James Karen, Karen Black, Laraine Newman, Louise Fletcher, Timothy Bottoms
Summary:
A boy tries to stop aliens who have taken over his town and are attempting to brainwash its inhabitants.
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The director, Tobe Hooper, who honed his scary craft on such films as ''The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'' and ''Poltergeist,'' knows how to construct a horror film so it builds to a screaming pitch. He shoots many of his images from below, to give the view a child might have, and deftly manipulates the audience to feel the growing menace. He is helped by an excellent cast.
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Director Tobe Hooper seems to want his homage and his "Saturday Night
Live," too. One minute he's reveling in hair-raising terror; in the next,
he's dishing up naughty, nasty camp. [9 June 1986, p.5C]
The new remake has several strikes against it: self-indulgent dialogue, uneven performances, stupid shock effects, and a paranoid view of space exploration. It's also about 20 minutes too long. Yet it packs a strong wallop about half the time, if you see it as a child's-eye-view story that taps directly into preteen fears and fantasies.
The most memorable scene in Invaders belongs to Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). She also turns in the best performance as the school marm who, after the Martians get to her, gobbles a bullfrog and becomes the movie's gleeful and insane Madame LaFarge. [14 June 1986, p.C6]
Despite its occasional sparkle, Invaders From Mars is an overlong movie with a tiny spirit. It plays to a certain smug superiority of an audience nurtured on junky television, and while that smugness is in some ways justified -- movies like the original "Invaders From Mars" had their obvious failings -- it's also, over the course of a feature film, more than a little annoying. The original "Invaders From Mars" did something this spoof never even comes close to -- it scared the heck out of you. That's something Hooper might try accomplishing, before he sets about sending it up.
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