Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to an all new Reaction & Review. Tonight, guys, I'm covering a Sci-Fi comedy from 1990. That movie is "Spaced Invaders".
Now, I actually did want to check this film out a couple of years ago after discovering a trailer for this movie on YouTube. And the trailer looked kinda, sorta interesting enough for me to check out. I was originally gonna cover it on YouTube at the time, however, I eventually nixed that idea for other movies that I had lined up then. Thankfully, I was finally able to get a copy of this movie thanks to one of my local video stores for carrying a copy of it.
Now as for what I know about the movie itself, all I can really tell you guys is that it's about aliens invading Earth, and it somehow leads into hi-jinx from there. I don't exactly remember the full plot on this one, because, like I said, it has been about a couple of years since I last saw the trailer for this movie. So I'm mostly going into this thing as blind as possible. Which I'm totally cool with.
I'm hoping for this thing to be pretty good. I don't really know if it will be, though. The only way I'm gonna find that out is if I shut up and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "Spaced Invaders".
5 minutes later
Wait a second...is that the old man from "Killer Klowns from Outer Space"? You know, the one where he and his dog "Winnie the Pooh" got turned into cotton candy? Holy shit, I think it is! That's certainly really cool. I'm hoping he'll last longer here than how he did in "Killer Klowns from Outer Space", but we'll just have to wait and see.
7 minutes later
So the way the aliens discovered Earth's signal was that some radio station was playing Orson Welles's famous speech about martians from outer space. Well, that's certainly a unique way to discover it, I'll say that much.
5 minutes later
Guys, I'm just gonna say this right now. The mouth movements on these aliens, whenever they're talking, look horrible. I'm hoping, maybe, that I'll end up getting use to it as the movie progresses. But as of now, I'm not really a fan of these aliens mouth movements.
15 minutes later
You know, guys, I totally understand that it's been a long time since I went trick-or-treating, but I don't recall ever getting cigarettes as a treat before. Is that just a thing some people in Illinois give out every year during Halloween? I'm kinda curious about that, because I've obviously never visited Illinois, outside of passing by it a few times. So if anybody from Illinois is actually reading this, can you clarify that for me as to whether or not you give out cigarettes to kids on Halloween? I'm really kinda curious here.
20 minutes later
So in the aliens attempt to destroy the humans "missile silo", what they really destroyed was the top of a water tower. I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that these aliens aren't exactly the brightest bunch, now are they?
1 minute later
Oh, so it wasn't actually water, it was...popcorn, I think. I'm not totally sure if that's accurate or not, but at least it wasn't water, so my mistake there.
6 minutes later
OK, I have a bit of a question here. Is this kid ever gonna take off that stupid beak from his duck costume? Well correction, his costume looks more like a turkey than a duck, but I digress. The beak is kinda distracting me and I sorta wish he would take it off so that he can speak a little bit more properly. But hey, perhaps that's just me.
15 minutes later
Well, what do you know? The movie actually answered one of my questions. Yes, the kid I mentioned a moment ago wearing the duck costume with the stupid beak on his mouth is no longer wearing the costume. He's just in normal clothes now. Not sure how he found out where Kathy and the aliens were, but I can kinda, sorta let that slide for now.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "Spaced Invaders". Let me go ahead and shut the movie off now...OK. So, um...where to start here? I'm gonna be perfectly honest with you guys when I say that I am kind of disappointed in this movie. I wanted to really like it. But unfortunately, the flaws I'm about to discuss here are gonna hinder this movie to a point where I'm not sure if I can even recommend it to you guys.
So, let's start off this review here by first discussing the writing. I'm gonna start off with the biggest problem with this movie as a whole, and that is the pacing. The pacing in this movie is absolutely atrocious. This film takes *forever* to get itself moving. The worst of it comes from the last third of the film where our heroes are trying to get the aliens home. That part of the film's pacing is so bad that it honestly felt like a 2 hour movie. And mind you, the movie's about an hour 40 minutes long, which isn't really doing much favors to begin with, but in some cases, that shouldn't feel like a problem. But again, because of how badly paced this movie is, it really drags the movie down to a screeching halt.
While I'm on the subject of pacing, this movie also has no sense of direction on where it wants to go. I have a theory that, after the aliens landed on Earth, the movie just decided to wing itself and just improvise scenes as they went along. Because this movie feels incredibly all over the place. We have scenes that jump back and forth between the aliens, the old man, our two main child characters, to another alien and his mind controlled human servant, this movie just feels very uneven and it has no idea on what it wants to truly focus on. That also leads into another problem that I'll get to in a moment, but just to summarize for you guys, the pacing in this movie is some of the worst I have ever experienced in a movie in a long time. And mind you, I watched "Critters 4" not too long ago, and as bad as the pacing in that thing was, it's looking a hell of a lot better when compared to this movie. This movie is just slow, boring, and really directionless.
Which then perfectly leads into the next big problem with this movie: the characters. And the first thing I need to talk about in regards to that are the aliens themselves. All of the aliens in this movie are basically stupid as shit. OK, I know that's suppose to be the point to their characters, but the problem here with that is that you can't just rely on their stupidity to make them stand out. You also have to make them interesting in some way, which this movie does not do. The only noticeable things about them is that most of them are supporting accents, with one of them putting on a Jack Nicholson impersonation. I'll talk about that later when I get to acting, believe me. But yeah, none of the aliens in this movie have any real interesting personalities other than being dumb as shit. And as for everything else involving the comedy, well...nothing about it is really all that funny. Like I said, it felt like the movie was just winging itself for anything to be funny, but unfortunately, the comedy just falls flat on it's face.
As for our human characters, well, none of them really stand out, with the one lone exception being the old man. And that's basically because he's sorta playing the same character that he did from "Killer Klowns from Outer Space". The only difference between this movie and that one is that he's not killed off very early in the latter. In fact, he doesn't die at all in this movie, but still, you get my point. He's the only stand out for me, personally. As for everyone else, well, none of them really stand out in any fashion. I thought Kathy, who's one of the leading child actors in this movie, was gonna stand out more. But she really doesn't. It's mentioned very early on that her mother died back in May, and I thought that would bring up some kind of drama between her and her Dad. But nothing comes from it, because it's mentioned only one time and is never brought up again in the film. So that's an example of wasted potential for our characters.
And even though I did enjoy seeing the old man again, it's also kind of a shame, because there's a subplot that's also brought up way early on where some dick-headed sheriff is after his farm and that if the old man doesn't pay him the money he needs the following day, or if there's not a single crop growing in his garden, he's going to lose his farm. I thought the movie was going to do something a little bit more with it. But like with Kathy's Mom, it's never really brought up again, at least until the very end of the movie where, spoilers, he ends up getting a bunch of crops thanks to the help of the aliens spaceship and his farm is saved. So yeah, that's all the subplot you get from this movie. It's over and done with just like that.
So yeah, guys, um...writing in this movie is just not very good at all. It's boggled down by it's awful pacing, and it obviously could've used a *lot* of trimming down. Now, as for the acting, well...it's kind of a mixed bag. The best actor, by far, would have to be Royal Dano, but again, that's mainly because he plays the same character as he did from "Killer Klowns from Outer Space", so I'm mostly being kinda biased when it comes to that one. As for the aliens, most of them just sounded really fucking annoying with their accents as the actors were trying to ham them up to be funny, but it mostly doesn't work. The worst actor, though, has to go to the alien with the Jack Nicholson impersonation. Now admittedly, I didn't really get the accent at first until a little halfway into the movie where the movie started to focus more on him, and I'm just gonna say it, the impersonation is just horrible. Like, he *really* tries to ham up this impersonation so much for the entire film, but it's just so fucking bad. What's sad about this is that, out of all the aliens, he's the only one who sounds less annoying than the others. But that's like saying a small pile of shit isn't nearly as bad as a big mountain of shit. That's not really helping things much. The rest of the human actors are OK at best, but that's also not saying very much here.
Special effects, for the most part, are halfway decent. The visual effects are pretty good for it's time, and costuming and animatronics on the aliens look rather decent, too. However, that leads into a big problem that stuck out at me from the very beginning about them. I said earlier, and it bears repeating, the mouth movements on these aliens are fucking horrible. Most of the time, their dialogue doesn't seem to match up with what they're trying to say. Most of the mouth movements look like gibberish, and it just doesn't look natural on these aliens at all. And I tried to overlook this problem as the movie went on, but it just became more of an issue the more that I saw these aliens talking. It just seems to me that almost nobody put any effort into making these mouth movements look natural.
Now aside from that, the camerawork here is pretty good. Lighting here is fine. The sound-mixing is fine, too. And the music here is actually rather decent. There's really not much else I can say about it, other than it sounds fine.
But ultimately, guys, when everything is said and done, can I recommend "Spaced Invaders"? As much as I'd like to say maybe give it a once-over or rent it somewhere, I really can't do that. This movie's problems are too much for me to ignore. The biggest, and most obvious problem, is the film's pacing. That right there is the reason why I can't recommend this film to you guys. Perhaps maybe had this film been trimmed down to about 20 minutes or so, then maybe I would've said it's worth watching once. But as is, there's no way I can recommend this movie to you guys. There's no way you're gonna get past the awful pacing, and it'll most likely put you to sleep, since the movie is incredibly boring, too. So yeah, unfortunately, I can't recommend this thing in any way, shape, or form. And on that note, I'm gonna go and watch a better movie. And seeing as how this movie not only reminded me of "Killer Klowns from Outer Space", but also had the same actor from that movie in this one, I'm gonna go and watch that right now. And it's also the perfect time of the year for it, too, so that makes it even better for me.
Anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all later. Peace.
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