Don’t get too excited about that title. Yes, I know that it says Alien 2: On Earth, which would suggest that this is a sequel to the classic sci-fi horror film that we all know and love but …. well, we’ll get to it in a moment.
First, let’s talk about the movie….
HEY, EARTH! YOU’RE GETTING INVADED AGAIN!
This time, it’s not flying saucers. It’s not pod people. It’s not the monsters from Cloverfield or A Quiet Place or Battle Los Angeles or Skyline or any of those films. Instead, this time, you’re getting invaded by little blue rocks. These rocks may look pretty but, if you hold them long enough, something will spring out of them and cause your face to explode. Sometimes, the creature inside the rock will even hug onto your face for a while. I guess maybe you could call it a face hugger, assuming that you had enough money to settle the copyright suit that would follow….
Famed cave explorer Thelma Joyce (Belinda Mayne) has been having horrific visions, largely due to the fact that she’s psychic whenever it’s convenient for the plot. Could her visions have something to do with a spacecraft that has recently returned to Earth with all of its inhabitants missing? (The implication is that the spacecraft was captained by a man named Dallas and had a warrant officer named Ripley, though that’s never specifically stated.)
Oh, why worry about all that ominous outer space stuff? After all, Thelma and her husband Roy (Mark Bodin) have already got a full weekend planned out. They’re going to get together with a group of friends and explore a cave! It sounds like fun. Of course, on the way to the cave, one of their friends finds a blue rock and decides to take it with him. Hmmm….there’s no way that could backfire.
Once everyone’s in the cave, Thelma tells Roy that she has a feeling that something awful is about to happen. Roy laughs off her concerns. I mean, is Thelma supposed to be a psychic or something? Oh, wait a minute….
Can you guess what happens? If you think that Roy, Thelma, and their friends end up getting trapped in the cave with an alien that’s looking to dissolve all of their faces, you might be as much of a psychic as Thelma. Needless to say, everyone picked the wrong weekend to go underground.
This Italian production from 1980 is, in many ways, a typical low-budget exploitation film. There’s a lot of gore (including a pretty nifty beheading) and the film ends on a properly (and somewhat humorously) dark note but it takes forever for the movie to actually get going. Fans of Italian horror will be happy to see Michele Soavi show up as one of the cave explorers and, if nothing else, the film does feature an effective sequence involving a survivor running down the streets of an eerily deserted city.
That said, this film is best-remembered as an example of just how shameless that Italian film industry could be when it came to ripping off more successful films. Alien 2 had nothing to do with the original Alien but, because Ridley Scott’s film was a huge hit, the film was marketed as being a direct sequel. Because the word “alien” existed long before any of the movies using it as a title were ever released, 20th Century Fox’s efforts to sue producer/director Ciro Ippolito for copyright infringement were just as unsuccessful as Ippolito’s later attempt to sue the makers of The Descent for, in Ippolito’s opinion, ripping off his story of cave explorers getting ripped apart by a strange creature.
So, no, this is not technically a part of the Alien franchise …. unless you want it to be. That’s the fun thing about watching an unofficial sequel like this. You can decide for yourself whether or not to accept it.
Finally, keep watching the skies and don’t pick up any blue rocks! To quote the film’s final title card, “YOU MAY BE NEXT!”
It’s been a while since I reviewed a real grindhouse/exploitation film on this site so I want to remedy that by talking about an English slasher film called Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas.
As the movie opens, we find ourselves in England with Christmas quickly approaching. The fog-drenched streets of London have apparently been besieged by drunk old men dressed up like Santa Claus. However, at least one citizen has taken things into his own hands by wandering the streets at night and killing anyone he comes across dressed as Santa Claus. Seriously, we see a lot of Jolly St. Nicks meeting an untimely end in this film. Most of them are done in by straight razor but at least one ends up getting shot and then another ends up bursting into flame and one Santa even up getting a spear driven through the back of his head.
That Santa has a daughter named Kate (Belinda Mayne) and Kate has a boyfriend named Cliff (Gerry Sundquist). While they make most of their money by standing out in the middle of street and playing the flute, Cliff also has a side job as just a generally sleazy guy. The day after Kate’s father dies, Cliff tries to convince Kate to take part in a pornographic, Santa-themed photo shoot. Needless to say, Kate doesn’t react well to this and storms out. So, Cliff convinces another model to wear the Santa suit. That model is later caught outside in that Santa suit by the killer. However, after opening the suit and giving the camera an excuse to linger over the model’s body the killer leaves without harming her. This would seem to indicate that he’s only looking to kill men in Santa suits. Normally, I’d be all for this development because fair play is fair play except for the fact that its eventually revealed that the whole Santa suit thing is pretty much just a red herring. But, more on that later.
Anyway, Kate wants justice for her father but unfortunately, the police investigation is being headed up by Inspect Harris and you know that Harris isn’t going to be much help because he’s played by Edmund Purdom. Purdom appeared in a lot of Italian and Spanish horror films in the 70s and 80s and he was always the epitome of British incompetence. Purdom is also credited as being director here but again, more on that later.
Now, by the time the 100th Santa has been brutally murdered, you might think that people would just naturally stop dressing up as Santa Claus when they’re out in public but no, that doesn’t appear to occur to anyone. Instead, we get a mall Santa getting castrated while standing at a urinal. And then we get another one getting killed while visiting a local sex shop and talking to a character credited as “the Experience Girl” (played surprisingly well by Kelly Baker). Yet another Santa finds himself getting murdered while backstage at a TV variety show. His body is discovered by Caroline Munro (star of Starcrash and Maniac) who plays herself and gets to sing a disco song before finding the body. She also gets to wear this really amazing red dress that I would kill to own because, seriously…
Suddenly, this guy named Giles (played by Alan Lake, who apparently died right before this film was released) pops up and tells Kate that he’s a reporter and he starts asking her all theese questions about her father. Kate gets mad and tries to call up Inspector Harris just to be told that Harris is out for the day taking care of some personal business. Hmmm…could Harris be our killer? It makes sense since he’s played by Edmund Purdom. Then again, Cliff could be the killer as well because, while Kate is doing all this, Cliff is making money by selling her sexual favors to his friends. Then again, it seems that Giles might be the killer because he then promptly shows up and kills Kate.
Meanwhile (we’re only about 40 minutes in to the film by this point), the Experience Girl is being interviewed by Harris’s partner, a tall guy named Powell who hates women. The Experience Girl tells Powell that she would know who the killer is if she saw the killer smile. Powell tells her she’s an idiot. So, the Experience Girl goes back to work. Giles shows up and smiles. Experience Girl screams. Giles kidnaps her but instead of killing her, he takes her to his flat and chains her up. Giles explains that he’s a killer because Inspector Harris is his brother and Giles is jealous. The Experience Girl knows who Harris is despite the fact that we’ve only seen her meet Powell.
Speaking of Powell, he investigates Kate’s death and realizes he may have made a mistake dismissing the Experience Girl. Then he tries to open a car door and gets electrocuted until he eventually ends up blowing up.
Now, none of this qualifies as being a spoiler because, even at this point, there’s still nearly 40 minutes of plot left.
Like a lot of 80s grindhouse films, the production of Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas is shrouded in mystery. Shooting on the film apparently started in 1981 but it the film wasn’t actually completed and released until 1984. Reportedly, Edmund Purdom was the original director but he ended up walking off the set which led to screenwriter Derek Ford taking over the movie for two days before he was apparently fired. The film was then completed by Alan Birkinshaw (and possibly a few other people), working under the name of Al McGoohan.
Certainly, this explains why the film is such a huge mess but it’s also a part of the fun as watching the movie becomes a game of trying to figure out who directed what.
Since Purdom walked off the film, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that he directed all of the scenes that he appears in. (It also explains why his character disappears from the movie after the first 40 minutes.) These scenes are all distinguished by the general immobility of the camera. Purdom’s scenes are so static and so defiantly dull that they almost work in a strangely Warholian way. The actors wander into frame, the actors wander out of the frame, the out-of-focus lens rebelliously refuses to follow them.
The non-Purdom scenes — the scenes in which men dressed like Santa are graphically murdered and the scenes featuring the “Rxperience Girl” — appear to have snuck in from a totally different movie and often, they’re only link to anything we’ve seen in the Purdom scenes is some awkwardly dubbed dialogue. These scenes feel as if they’re drenched in sleaze. The camera not only moves, it lingers and it invades like a voyeur looking at dirty pictures in a public library. Unpleasant on their own, these scenes somehow become even more distasteful when compared to the aritificiality of the Purdom scenes.
It all makes for a very disorienting viewing experience and if the film isn’t really well-done enough to ever become disturbing or nightmarish, it still had a very odd dream-like feel to it. Major characters wander through the film without every actually meeting each other. Seemingly important plot points are brought up just to be quickly abandoned and forgotten. Even all the multiple murders turn out to have very little to do with Santa Claus or Christmas. If nothing else, this is a unique slasher film in that the murders are pretty much just red herrings.
There’s a lot in this movie that doesn’t work but, as with many grindhouse films, that just adds to the charm of Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas. Even the ending — which everyone seems to criticize — is oddly appropriate in that it makes as little sense as everything else we’ve seen on screen. Also, like most grindhouse films, there’s a handful of memorable moments that actually do work. For instance, the killer’s mask is genuinely creepy. The scene where Giles chases the Experience Girl through the streets of London is also handled well and is even more suspenseful in that it takes place during the day as opposed to expected dark and foggy night. And again, Kelly Baker is a sympathetic, if unexpected, protaganist in the role of the Experience Girl (though you get the feeling that the role was created and cast long after Purdom left the initial production). Finally, this is a film that epitomizes the spirit that makes the Grindhouse great — i.e., it may have taken two years and multiple directors and the end result might be kind of chaotic but, in the end, the movie got made.
I ended up watching Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas last night because there have been reports that its about to finally snow here in North Texas and, as a result, I was in a holiday mood. Since this is apparently one of those movies that has entered the public domain, the version I own is a part of one of those “50 Horror Classics” collections that Mill Creek puts out. As a result, the transfer looked and sounded terrible. But you know what? That terrible transfer added a certain charm to the film. Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas is a movie that was meant to be seen with a lot of random scratches and faded colors flashing across the screen.
So, in the end, Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas is a pretty bad movie but it’s an undeniably watchable and oddly memorable one. Plus, it features that really great red dress. Seriously, just to die for…
Through the Shattered Lens 