Bargain Bin Review: Galaxy Invader

Directed by Don Dohler, 1985, 80 minutes, unrated
The Hamlet of Bad Movies

 

My old podcasting partner, Jason Soto of Rabbit Hole Productions, challenged me with this movie, but in a perverse way, I’m grateful. Galaxy Invader is the brainchild of writer-director-producer Don Dohler, isn’t available through all the regular means, and appears to be shot over the course of a weekend for about $60. In other words, it’s a classic Bargain Bin Review.

Galaxy Invader opens at night, with a car doing about 12 miles an hour through a meadow. Suddenly, a shooting star! The shooting star does a bunch of loop de loops – something I understand your typical shooting star is incapable of – and then crashes in the forest just over yonder hill. We then cut to the crash site, where we get the first-person perspective of what I imagine to be an asthmatic alien.

Already, I’m starting to think that Galaxy Invader is a terrible title for this film.

The driver, a young man named David, calls his old college professor from a pay phone to tell him about the UFO sighting. The Prof immediately believes David, and asks David to wait by the side of the road for (I kid you not) six hours to meet up with him. David obliges, so we can forget about him for a while.

That next morning – I think? This movie has a lot of time issues – we get more first-person perspective of our Galaxy Invader invading the basement of a young couple, thoroughly interrupting their quality time of slurping coffee, reading the newspaper and not talking. It’s a standard issue horror sequence, and oddly, the only one in the whole movie. We do get our first view of the Galaxy Invader, and it looks like the Toxic Avenger and the Creature from the Black Lagoon had a love child and dressed it in black suspenders.

Enough of that! It’s time for Dysfunctional Family Theatre! We meet the Montagues, a backwater family who puts the “diss” in dysfunctional. Seriously, they make the family in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night look like The Simpsons. They’re like The Waltons if they all absolutely hated each other.

Naturally, they’re our main characters. Joy. Well, let’s meet ‘em:

Pa is an alcoholic with a fine collection of torn t-shirts. He’s lazy and not very bright, but makes up for it by verbally abusing everyone else in the family and being quick to pull out his rifle. That’s not a euphemism for anything – I mean he literally pulls out a hunting rifle anytime someone annoys him. He often sounds like a cranky Jimmy Stewart.

Ma complains a lot and gets yelled at by everyone because she doesn’t cook fast enough, as if she has full control over the laws of physics in her kitchen. She is literally useless until the final minutes of the film when she does something incredibly out of character.

Carol is the elder daughter – she’s 25-years-old, don’t treat her like a child! – and is always giving her father lip. She’s sassy!

J.J. is the simpering son who basically serves as Pa’s lackey. On the plus side, he’s moderately smarter than Pa and owns a shirt without rips in it.

Annie is a teenager. Her main function is to tell us how much she hates Pa. And Scrabble. But mostly Pa.

 

So, Carol shoots her mouth off to Pa and runs off. Pa grabs his rifle and chases after her, like any loving father would do. J.J. runs after Pa, because Ma told him to. Carol finds her boyfriend, Michael, hanging out by The Smokin’ Tree. Michael immediately scolds her for being late, which is how he says hello. Carol tells Michael about the fight with Pa, and they storm off so Michael can give Pa a piece of his mind.

Meanwhile, Pa and J.J. see the Galaxy Invader and Pa promptly shoots it. The end? No, but Pa and J.J. do take the Galaxy Invader’s special toy: a Crystal Orb of Unusual Pulsing. They take it back to the house, and that’s when we’re treated to some crackling dialogue. The characters don’t so much speak to each other as rattle through their lines, often turning from anger to curiosity and back to random hostility on a dime. Mamet this ain’t.

Pa has dollar signs in his eyes, so he calls in his good buddy, Frank. We know Frank is an extra dodgy schemer by the way he chews tobacco and smokes a cigar at the same time – same way we know Frank’s girlfriend Vicki is extra sexy because our first shot of her is her legs.

Frank comes up with a sure-fire scheme: Round up a posse of guys from the bar to help capture the “spaceman,” and Get Rich. They head down to the local watering hole – which is packed, despite the fact that it’s only like 10:00 a.m. or whatever. Also, based on the way Ma, Carol, Vicki and the women in this bar are treated, this whole town runs on misogyny. Anyway, they get a bunch of guys to go hunting with them that night.

Yes, at night. Isn’t it dangerous enough to try and capture an alien being? Why does Frank want to hunt the Galaxy Invader at night? Frank never lets us in on that one.

Meanwhile, David and The Prof have been wandering around the woods all this time. Each time we check in on them, The Prof comments on how they’re “losing the light.” Eventually, they decide to cut bait, what with all the light they’re losing, and teleport to bar where they catch word of Frank and Pa’s hunting trip. They decide to trail the hunting party and observe.

Armed with rifles and beer, the posse heads out under Frank’s confusing guidance (“Fan out, but stay close!”). Despite having miles of forest to cover in the dark of night, the posse finds the Galaxy Invader in short order, and it’s a shootout! Somehow, Frank, Pa and J.J. get the jump on the Galaxy Invader and tie it up. As The Prof exclaims, “Oh great! The biggest scientific event in the history of the world is being lassoed by a bunch of rednecks!”

Ever the red-blooding American, Pa immediately speculates that the Russians might give him a million dollars for the Galaxy Invader’s ray gun.

From here, Galaxy Invader features lots of sneaking around and lots of stealing, losing and reclaiming the Crystal Orb of Unusual Pulsing. It also features the realization that the alien isn’t so much a galaxy invader as a tourist – I told you this was a terrible title for the film. The story clicks right along (albeit incoherently) leading up to some terribly performed fight scenes, the ol’ “replace the actor with a giant rag doll getting thrown off a cliff” bit, and a body count on par with Hamlet.

That’s right: I’ve compared this delightfully inept mess to both Long Day’s Journey into Night and Hamlet. How’s that for a solid Bargain Bin movie?

 

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