Spanning three decades, my latest movie marathon is a retro-tastic dive into lower tier flicks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
THE POSSESSED (1977)
Four years after the release of The Exorcist, movies were still trying to chase its fame, even on television. This made-for-TV movie has nothing going for it beyond a cool cast of familiar faces, including Harrison Ford, Ann Dusenberry (the girl who cried, “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-shark!” in Jaws 2), PJ Soles of Halloween, Diana Scarwid of Strange Invaders and Psycho III, and Dinah Manoff of Grease. Awesome.
There’s this girls’ school, and for some unknown reason, shit starts going on fire: a typewriter, a dorm room, a fricking girl. Seriously, this demon is actually just a firestarter. So silly.
A detective comes to investigate the fires, but one of the teachers decides something supernatural is going on, so she calls in a priest, at which point the movie plays out mostly like a drama.
Suddenly at the end, another staff member reveals she is possessed while standing by an indoor pool. The priest comes in, the demon tries to firestart him, the power of Christ is compelled to put the fire out, the demon spits tacks out of her mouth at him, and finally he jumps in the pool to exorcise her.
All of this while they’re just standing there staring at each other. WTF with this movie? I don’t even think I saw this one back when it was released, and I saw like every made-for-TV movie in those days.
ALIENATOR (1988)
This is a totally goofy play on The Terminator concept…with a bodybuilder woman as a metal-bikini-wearing alien with a laser gun attached to her arm that sounds exactly like a lightsaber.
Jan Michael Vincent runs a space prison where PJ Soles and Joseph Pilato (the douche from Day of the Dead) also work. However, all there have minor roles.
A prisoner pulls a C-3PO and R2-D2 and escape pods his way to Earth, is struck by an RV full of young people, and then tries to warn them that someone will be coming for him and they will be in danger, too.
There’s a local sheriff, two silly rednecks (silly rednecks always found alien happenings in the woods in 80s movies), and our Alienator with her big body and punk rock wig running around the woods a lot. Of note is that there is a kill that reminds us that filmmakers used to actually light people on fire to get it to look like someone was lit on fire….
Thing is, not much happens. She incinerates someone now and then, but it’s not until the last 20 minutes that she closes in on the group of friends, who have holed up in a cabin and must fight back.
Fred Olen Ray directs and definitely captures the cheesiness of late 80s, direct-to-video sci-fi, he just doesn’t deliver something worth remembering. The most memorable part is some space leeches the prisoner uses as weapons during his initial escape.
OUT THERE (1995)
This is a charming yet slow-moving nod to sci-fi flicks of the 50s and 60s, and it even begins in 1969, with two men having a close encounter. But of what kind?
In the modern day, cutie Billy Campbell scores a camera that has old film in it…with photos of that 1969 encounter. He meets the daughter of one of the men in those photos, and she is determined to find out what happened to her dad, since those photos are the last he was ever seen.
The pair begins to do some detecting, and they interact with the likes of Julie Brown, Rod Steiger, Billy Bob Thornton, Jill St. John, Bobcat Goldthwait, and PJ Soles. This almost could have been a PJ Soles movie marathon, but she isn’t in any of these films long enough to warrant that label. This one only gives her approximately ten seconds of screen time!
There is a lot of talk, so despite the great retro vibe, not much beyond conversations actually goes on for a majority of the movie. There’s humor, but the material is played straight, so there’s no over-the-top comedy.
The highlight really is the final act. The truth about the aliens is uncovered, there are some twists, we get some classic aliens, and there’s a chase scene. There’s even a mean shot taken at Michael Jackson and the possibility that he’s an alien!
