The first time I saw Invaders From Mars I was maybe 8 or 9 and home sick from school. It was a tradition when I was sick that I was allowed a movie from the local video shop (this being the 80s, when everything was on VHS and you had to walk a whole 10 minutes to get to a brick-and-mortar rental shop), and so while looking for my usual Transformers and M.A.S.K. go-tos I saw this movie in the Children's section and thought it looked like something good to watch. I didn't know anything about horror back then and certainly nothing about the director, Tobe Hooper, but the movie captivated me and probably planted the first seeds of what would later become my love of horror movies.
David Gardner is woken up in the middle of the night by a thunderstorm and sees an alien spacecraft land behind the hill next to his house. He tells his parents about this and, although they are skeptical, his father goes to check it out the next morning and returns acting strangely and with a strange wound on the back of his neck. Gradually more and more people go up to the hill and its accompanying sandpit for varying reasons, and all come back with the same strange behaviour and wound on the back of their necks, including two police officers and David's thoroughly unpleasant Biology teacher Mrs. McKeltch. The only person David can get to believe him is the school nurse Linda, and the two of them end up on the run from the changed townspeople, who turn out to be doing the bidding of Martians who have landed on Earth for predictable nefarious reasons. David has to convince people that the Martian threat is real and stop them before they succeed in their plans...
You have to wonder just who said to themselves, "You know who would be a great director for our remake of the 1953 sci-fi Invaders From Mars, which we're planning on marketing as a kids' film? The guy who directed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!" To be fair though, Hooper was working with studio Cannon on a three-picture deal, of which Invaders From Mars was the second (the first was Lifeforce and the third The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), so it's unlikely that this was the result of someone just mixing up their genres badly.
The thing is, Hooper makes a really good kids' horror film. Watching it 25+ years later, of course, I found myself looking for my nostalgia glasses quite a bit, but I still remember how enthralled I was by it back then, because it taps into those fears that just about every child has at some point in their childhood. The fear of losing your parents and/or having them turn against you; that your most hated teacher really is something inhuman; that you're the only one who knows what's really going on but no-one wants to listen to you because you're a kid... All of that is going to strike a chord with the kids watching because it's all stuff they think about at some point while growing up. As the movie progresses, in fact, it becomes more and more of a child's fantasy of how they would save the day, climaxing when David convinces the US Marines to launch an attack on the Martian spacecraft, complete with guns, explosives and tanks, and they take him with them because he's still the only one who can help them save the day. I'm pretty sure that if the rights had been available, Superman and Batman would have flown in to help as well and made David an honorary member of the Justice League at the end (although J'onn J'onzz would probably have had some awkward questions to answer back at the Watchtower afterwards).
This, however, leads me to the film's biggest flaw. Technically this is a SPOILER, so be warned: at the very climax of the film, when anything non-human has been shot, blown up and generally massacred, suddenly David wakes up in his bed. It was all a dream!... Or was is just a premonition?
No! Bad movie, no! Don't make me get the rolled-up newspaper! We've talked about this before - the "it was all just a dream" ending is a cheap cop-out for a film to pull on its audience. It effectively erases any and all character building and attachment to the characters we've made through the last 100 minutes or so for a cheap ending. Even if it's a kids' film, the audience should still be treated better than that - it's lazy writing and it tarnishes the whole film. Urgh.
Aside from that... misstep at the end, there are still plenty of genuinely creepy moments in the film. David discovering Mrs. McKeltch doing her best impression of the Visitors from V is one; another is the design of the interior of the Martian ship and the Martians themselves. The ship has a very bio-mechanical design, thanks to Stan Winston, that made me think as I rewatched it now of the Alien movies; the aliens are just... freaky-looking. Although the Martian Supreme Intelligence bears more than a passing resemblance to Kraang of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon...
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