In 1983, two years after the release of Strange Behavior, director Michael Laughlin and Bill Condon teamed up for another “strange” film. Like their previous collaboration, this film was a combination of horror, science fiction, and satire.
The title of their latest collaboration?
Strange Invaders.
Strange Invaders opens in the 1950s, in a small, all-American town in Illinois. Innocent children play in the street. Clean-cut men stop off at the local diner and talk to the waitress (Fiona Lewis, the scientist from Strange Behavior). Two teenagers (played by the stars of Strange Behavior, Dan Shor and Dey Young) sit in a car and listen to forbidden rock’n’roll music. A lengthy title crawl informs us that, in the 1950s, Americans were happy and they were only worried about three things: communists, Elvis, and UFOs. On schedule, a gigantic UFO suddenly appears over the town.
Twenty-five years later, mild-mannered Prof. Charles Bigelow (Paul Le Mat) teaches at a university and wonders just what exactly is going on with his ex-wife, Margaret (Diana Scarwid). In order to attend her mother’s funeral, Margaret returned to the small Illinois town where she grew up. When she doesn’t return, Charles decides to go to the town himself. However, once he arrives, he discovers that the town appears to still be stuck in the 50s. The townspeople are all polite but strangely unemotional and secretive. Charles immediately suspects that something strange is happening. When the towns people suddenly start shooting laser beams from their eyes, Charles realizes that they must be aliens!
Fleeing from the town, Charles checks all the newspapers for any reports of an alien invasion. The only story he finds is in a cheap tabloid, The National Informer. The author of the story, Betty Walker (Nancy Allen), claims that she just made the story up but Charles is convinced that she may have accidentally told the truth. At first, Betty dismisses Charles as being crazy. But then she’s visited by an Avon lady who looks just like the waitress from the small town and who can shoot laser beams.
Teaming up, Charles and Betty investigate the aliens and try to figure out just what exactly they’re doing on Earth. It’s an investigation that leads them to not only a shadowy government operative (Louise Fletcher) but also a man (Michael Lerner) who claims that, years ago, he helplessly watched as his family was destroyed by aliens.
Like Strange Behavior, Strange Invaders is a … well, a strange film. I have to admit that I prefer Behavior to Invaders. The satire in Strange Invaders is a bit too heavy-handed and Paul Le Mat is not as strong a lead as Michael Murphy was in the first film. I was a lot more impressed with Nancy Allen’s performance, if just because I related to both her skepticism and her sudden excitement to discover that her fake news might actually be real news. I also liked Micheal Lerner, so much so that I almost wish that he and Le Mat had switched roles. Finally, I have to say that Diana Scarwid’s performance was so bizarre that I’m not sure if she was brilliant or if she was terrible. For her character, that worked well.
Strange Invaders gets better as it goes along. At the start of the film, there are some parts that drag but the finale is genuinely exciting and clever. If the film starts as a parody of 1950s alien invasion films, it ends as a satire of Spielbergian positivity. It’s an uneven film but, ultimately, worth the time to watch.
Through the Shattered Lens 