Robert J. Maxwell Maybe it gets better. I wouldn't know. I made it through the first twenty minutes or so before cutting it off and entering a period of mourning. It was obvious that the plot itself was a familiar one. A man, Paul LeMatt, a professor of entymology at Columbia, drives with his dog to a small town in Ohio in search of his ex wife, Diana Scarwid. There he encounters people who either ignore him or are hostile. Oh, they may smile but there's something going on underneath.That sort of arrangement is home turf for movie makers and viewers alike, and it's pregnant with possibilities. You can turn out a neatly drawn commercial success like "Bad Day at Black Rock." Or it would have made, and probably DID make, a nice "Twilight Zone" episode.The cast includes some seasoned performers too, as well as some formerly prominent names. Kenneth Toby, a veteran of science fiction, is the superficially amiable motel manager. Diana Scarwid can give an impressive performance, as she did in, say, "Silkwood." For some of the others, their range is limited.But it's poorly directed and shabbily written.Example of shabby direction. That dog of LeMatt's is disliked by Kenneth Toby, right off the bat. So when LeMatt walks out to the street, Toby sneaks up to the window of his room, peers in at the dog, and something zaps. Cut to LeMatt in the street. He hears his dog howling away. Then a POV shot of presumably the dog zipping along towards LeMatt then past him while the wind blows and LeMatt gawks at the camera. Cut to an identical shot -- coming from the other direction! Whatever the camera represents, whatever LeMatt is staring at, is never shown. Maybe it was nothing, because suddenly the wind stops and LeMatt is alone in the street, looking a little bit puzzled. "You should never have brought that dog in the first place," remarks a smiling Toby from the porch. Question: What the hell is that scene all about? Example of shabby writing. Well, TWO examples. (1) If you were to sit down and write a stereotypical waitress in a small-town diner, without the exercise of any craft whatever, you'd come up with an expressionless babe with her hair piled on top of her head, chewing gum, sauntering among the tables. Right. (2) Anything resembling believability is thrown out the window in favor of special effects. LeMatt's car chugs to a halt, then explodes while it is waiting to be fixed at the garage. Chugging to a halt: believable. Exploding: supernatural. Not even Edgar Allan Poe would endorse such an event.And the invaders themselves? Think of a modest masterpiece like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Something is going wrong in Dr. Kevin McCarthy's small town, and it takes half the movie for the mystery to be unraveled, and all the time suspense is building and doubt is growing. Here, twenty minutes into the movie, a stranger walks into a motel room and tears off his plastic face, revealing a pulsing, light-emitting, naked brain. The pregnancy is aborted.I won't tell you the ending because I don't know what it is, nor do I care. I suppose it had something to do with insects because why else would Paul LeMatt be an entymologist? (By the way, who's handling his classes?) But I'm not even sure bugs were involved. It's entirely possible that the bug business was adventitious. The writers may have made him a specialist in insects and then forgot all about it. It wouldn't surprise me.

Samantha-Kimmel Where to begin.... This hideous excuse for a motion picture makes "Plan 9 From Outer Space" look well thought out. The music? It's culled from every single overwrought piece of PD shlock in existence. The focus? Hell, doesn't matter if in one shot there are thirty people standing in the road; the new angle shows a lone Packard with a waitress posing for Argosy Mag shots. Paul Le Mat, Diana Scarwid, Louise Fletcher, Wallace Shawn: fine actors who must have all been starving to death at that point in their lives and the director lured them to sign on with tempting bits of cat food. The production budget must have skyrocketed to well over fifty cents with the addition of The Space Alien Phallic Transportation Machine which, for a time, must have meant that the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile was not available. When Bad Movies Happen to Good Actors

ccthemovieman-1 A takeoff on the 1950s sci-fi films, this has its good moments and moves along a good clip, particularly in the first half. The second half doesn't measure up to the first 45 minutes.There is a mixture of satire on those '50s films along with some genuine suspense and action. There is even some bad acting and some bad dialog, but I couldn't tell if it was done on purpose! It wasn't as innocent as the old films, however, especially when Nancy Allen started using the Lord's name in vain. Other than that, it's a fairly clean, language-wise.It's okay but nothing great, certainly not "stunning," as quoted by Joel Siegel on the video box. Joel is one of those national film critics who is so far out of touch with normal citizens it's laughable.

Syl I never saw Strange Invaders until yesterday but I found it immensely pleasurable to watch. Diana Scarwid, Nancy Allen, Louise Fletcher, and the cast was pretty interesting to watch with their material about alien beings playing humans for 25 years. While it probably took off from E.T. in the previous year, Strange Invaders is worth watching for the fans of science fiction and fantasy. I enjoyed it immensely maybe because I think Diana Scarwid deserved better in terms of scripts and she should have been a household name ever since her performance as the older Christina Crawford in Mommy Dearest. Oscar Winner Louise Fletcher also deserved more than roles that were secondary, supporting or featuring. Nevertheless, Strange Invaders is strange but fun to watch for kids, adults, or anybody who doesn't take themselves too seriously.