UFO: Target Earth (1974)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Best movie of this year hands down!

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

One of the sorriest excuses I've ever seen for a movie, UFO: TARGET EARTH is the pits. Playing like a '70s-era X-FILES without any of the suspense, interest, or action, this is an endless series of conversations between boring non-actors: people chat on the telephone, people camp out and talk in a tent, people talk in vehicles, people talk over tables. It's all talk, and meaningless talk at that. Seriously, I wonder whether there was a script involved or whether the whole film was ad-libbed, because the film's full of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo that's completely laughable. Some of it's quite funny, actually, in a completely nonsensical way, but that's no recommendation to watch the film.When I read film reviews I often see people stating "this is an hour and a half of your life that you'll never get back". I usually don't agree, and find at least some merit in every film. No so here. There isn't even any of the sub-exotic cheesiness in duds like THE THIRSTY DEAD. Just a guy filming people out in Hicksville, USA, people who can't act for toffee. In fact, there was only one guy in the whole film – a college professor – who fit his role, and that's probably because he WAS a professor in real life. The main guy, Nick Plakias, reminded me of Dean Stockwell in THE DUNWICH HORROR, but there the similarity ends. I like Dean Stockwell, but this guy is just a boring nerd.So, what of the aliens or the UFO of the title? Well, it lurks beneath a lake for the entire picture, until the last fifteen minutes. Then the alien shows up, its head part of a pretty pattern on someone's TV set. Said pretty patterns play out until the end of the film, sometimes on screen for minutes on end without any type of dialogue. Even the UFO itself, when it rises from the lake, is produced via the same pattern. The patterns are pretty, but nothing you won't see on an everyday Windows screen saver. I suppose they must have been remarkable back in the day, but modern technology has robbed them of their impact. They're just generated patterns on a screen. I did find the hero's fate funny, though; he dons a succession of joke-shop wigs and descends into the lake, leaving just a polished skull behind. So funny, but not worth sitting the film out for. This one's a stinker, with no redemption anywhere. The bad news was that director Michael A. DeGaetano didn't call it a day – instead he felt the need to churn out another three flicks before realising he wasn't going anywhere.

WARNING: This review does not contain spoilers, as there is no discernible plot to spoil. I'm pleased to say that, as something of a connoisseur of bad films, this one goes straight into my top ten worst I've ever seen. Generally these films appear as one-offs. The crew manage to cobble together a script, borrow some equipment, find a local businessman with deep pockets to give them some cash and they make a movie. In this case, writer/director/producer Michael DeGaetano somehow managed to make three films! I sincerely hope (and seriously doubt) the others are better. As for "UFO:Target Earth", where does one start? -Characters constantly appearing out of nowhere with no description of who they are or why they are there.-A character begins to deliver a line and just...stops. Later,the same character blows a line but the take was kept.-Boom mics, camera tracks, out of sync audio, strange zooms and pans, jarring edits, time-shifts, .-A horrible prequel to the orgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally".-Characters standing half obscured by trees.-Constant rumbling crackle and pop in the soundtrack which I assume must have been real aliens desperately trying to stop the production for the sake of mankind.-Bad '70s music of every stripe, creepy electronic music for no reason whatsoever and I swear during the final scene, music stolen from much better films.-A General having a serious conversation while seated at his desk, twiddling a letter opener. No, wait...(pause)...THAT'S A BUTTER KNIFE! But the question that will bug me forever is this: Where did they get the power to run the equipment at the lake, and why choose to bring several televisions but Coleman lanterns instead of electric lights? The dialogue is trying desperately to be deep and meaningful, but the total lack of characterization and story line makes it laugh out loud funny.Some of my favorite lines: "I feel as though you are trying to bind my soul with your technology." "It's that light. No, it was like a big star.It was coming all...It was making me all naked". "That was just your waking star, son. Everyone has a waking star". (No, that's actually a desperate plea for help from an abused child.)"Somehow, I feel like I'm teetering on the edge of an enormous chasm of time, and space. It's a swaying sensation as if I was about to fall in." Hard to sum up the movie any better than that. The idea for the film isn't the worst I've ever seen, but this is one of the two or three most inept attempts at movie-making I've seen. And, yes, I've seen "Manos:The Hands Of Fate". If you like bad film, or just want to see what happens when a filmmaker leaves out every element necessary for a watchable movie, you should see this. Two stars, because it's too entertainingly bad to call "awful".

I don't really think I've ever seen anything like this before. It was like a surreal mix of Ed Wood, Stanley Kubrick, and Ken Russell. The micro-budget keeps things murky and confusing, heightening the surrealism. The directing is a bit poor, with sluggish pacing, pointless scenes of people philosophically discussing the nature of electricity and life on other planets, and special effects that come across like a fan-film homage to 2001.It's not a good movie. In fact, I'd say it's technically inept. However, despite that, I still found myself enjoying it, to some degree, because it was just so damn weird. In fact, I'd say that the incompetence only makes it more enthralling. As each scene was set up, I found myself wondering, "WTF?" There was some puzzling, obvious problem with the scene (like the boom mic being in the shot), the scene made no sense, or bad music was blaring, making the dialogue too difficult to hear. It's like they were in the woods one day, happened to have some filmmaking equipment, and decided to shoot a movie, doing everything in one take.Do I recommend this movie? Well, not on its merits. In order to enjoy it, I think you need to be the kind of person who watches a movie because he wants to see just how incomprehensible and incompetent it can get. You have to be the kind of person who, when he finds something that tastes awful, keeps eating it, eagerly, because he's so enthralled by the awfulness of it.Either that or you'd have to have a serious love for UFOs.I rate this a 5/10, because it's so amazingly incompetent that it becomes enjoyable on whole different level than was intended. If you're into Kubrick and Russell, you'll probably have fun finding homages and rip-offs, as well.

This is an incredible movie. It's not got everything! No plot, no tension, no character (let alone character development) - what it HAS got is a virtuoso display of incredibly bad direction and a script that gives the word meaningless a new... er... meaning.I suspect the director must have once had the concept of the Line of Interest (or the Centre Line, Director's Line call it what you will*) explained to him at some time but either forgot it almost immediately or just didn't get it because the camera is plonked down any old place and they shot whatever came into the viewfinder. Several times we get to watch people have long telephone conversations, but only from one end so we get to watch them say things like: "Yes I know all that." without having any idea what they have just been told. There are boom mikes in shot, tracks clearly visible, the DP does a great line in camera flares over people's faces and the sound levels are all over the place whole swathes of "dialogue" obscured by lousy songs. Though to be fair the sound problems may just be the quality of the DVD copy I saw; there was a lot of extraneous noise on the soundtrack (the songs ARE pretty sh1tty though). The script is bizarre; I honestly had no idea what was going on for the entire length of the film.The film opens with 3 minutes of mocumentary footage of people relating UFO experiences to a TV reporter. Then the opening credits (which were illegible on the copy I watched). Open on a young man trying to make a phone call then a portentous Voice Over (a la Ed Wood) tells us this young man is about to overhear something that will change his life forever. He somehow accidentally overhears two military types authorising a scramble of jets to investigate a UFO. The young man stares out of the window for a long time then phones someone else to make an appointment with someone else who turns out to be a psychic UFO spotter (or something). He then goes to meet his professor who lectures him (and us) at great length about the possibility of Life in the Universe. He goes to see 'Dr Mansfield' (whoever she is, we aren't told) and they have a conversation that really started the 'What the hell are they talking about?' ball rolling. The last line of the scene is "When a circle is drawn - they meet." Work backwards from there. After that it was a downhill slide into utter incomprehensibility. Ending in a low rent 2001: A Space Odyssey rip-off and the final bars of Khachaturian's Spartacus playing as the alien's space ship, trapped under a lake for a thousand years, zooms off to the stars powered only by Alan's imagination. Yep, you read that right, a bunch of aliens sat at the bottom of a lake for a thousand years waiting for a bad actor with a bald wig on to come and power their spaceship with his imagination. Insane.Favourite shot: Vivian and Alan sit in the back of the van excitedly telling each other some incomprehensible facts that are supposed to make the audience sit up and pay attention. They stop and the camera slowly zooms out leaving two bad actors sitting there waiting for the director to shout 'cut'. Luckily a huge lens flare obliterates them for most of it so we don't have to see them suffer too much.Favourite lines (favourite as in they made more sense than most. Three whole lines before I went WTF? ) Prof: What do we know about electricity?Alan: We know it's an energy source.Prof: Like the imagination.This is sublime stuff. Thoroughly recommended as a true awful classic. Seven out of ten on the Awfulometer. * An imaginary line drawn between two or more actors (and / or objects). Keeping the camera on one side of that line for several angles on one scene will allow those shots to be edited together with ease. Cross the line during shooting and you start having real problems as the on screen relationship between characters changes. Edit between the two and you get characters swapping places with each other and jumping from left to right of each other etc. Trust me, it's an easy concept to grasp, I'm just not explaining it very well.