cult film freak: MICHAEL LAUGHLIN'S 'STRANGE INVADERS' STARRING PAUL LE MAT

Title: STRANGE INVADERS Year: 1983 Rating: ***1/2

It's said director Michael Laughlin and co-writer Bill Condon were headed for a titular STRANGE Trilogy after STRANGE BEHAVIOR and STRANGE INVADERS, which was financially scrapped — yet for vehicles both celebrating and intentionally duplicating nostalgic science-fiction/horror, a STRANGE Double-Feature is actually more proper...

So following BEHAVIOR... a mesmerizing, slowburn horror also inspired by then-recent teenage slasher flicks... STRANGE INVADERS is a full-blown 1950's sci-fi homage, right down to throwback Technicolor-style soft focus and beginning with aliens encroaching a rural Eisenhower-era town, where an opening scrawl reads how America had only Elvis's pelvis and Communism to fear...

Dey Young and Dan Shor in STRANGE INVADERS

As cult actors Dey Young (ROCK N ROLL HIGH SCHOOL) and Dan Shor (TRON) provided the youthful leads in the first, here they're THE BLOB inspired car parked/kissing couple... that are never seen again...

Taking us right into the 1980's where cool-guy college professor Paul Le Mat teaches an entomology class... the study of bugs... providing the AMERICAN GRAFFITI star an ironic transition from bookworm to anti action-lead, winding up in search of his missing ex-wife (who he has a child with) in the small town she grew up... the same one we'd already witnessed being taken over by UFO's...

Nancy Allen in STRANGE INVADERS

So there's little suspense when he arrives, and the monotone weirdness of the spiffy anachronistic town-folk are already known to the audience yet entirely unknown to Le Mat's Charles Bigelow, whose desperate quest really ignites back in the city, attempting to report the formidable aliens he witnessed — a visually jarring revelation spoiled far too soon...

Thus introducing glib government agent Louise Fletcher, overlong flashbacking psych-ward patient Michael Lerner, and ingenue Nancy Allen, who, as a writer of National Inquirer style fake alien stories, and having been spotted conversing with Le Mat, is hunted by the most unique and interesting characters (befitting her previous CARRIE, BLOW-OUT and DRESSED TO KILL scream queen status)...

Fiona Lewis and Nancy Allen in STRANGE INVADERS

A lethal group of quirky 1950's-clad aliens in human-skin... led by small town greasy-spoon waitress turned bogus big city Avon Lady Fiona Lewis... providing an equal amount of violent horror into the science-fiction as there's science in the more horror-centered STRANGE BEHAVIOR...

Which is a superior entry — yet INVADERS still entertains as a brisk 90-minute genre hybrid... that could have been a more engrossing subtle-thriller than what's ultimately a mainstream action-packed attempt for a smash hit... that might've provided producers Laughlin and Condon their third unrealized venture.