Guilty Pleasures: Spaced Invaders

There’s a thin line between a good movie or a bad movie. Every week I try to erase that line.

SPACED INVADERS

 

 I believe that everyone has a group of movies that they made their parents rent CONSTANTLY. One of my films was Spaced Invaders. A bizarre little children’s film/sci-fi movie from 1990. Even though Halloween has past, I figure why not one more Halloween Guilty Pleasure for shits and giggles.

 Spaced Invaders follows a group of Martian army men under the direction of brand new Enforcer Drones. The small group of incompetent invaders mistake a rebroadcast of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds as the actual alien invasion of Earth. 

The group splits into three groups. Their pilot Blaznee decides this is a bad idea and decides to stay with the ship. None of the other aliens pay any attention to him however. I assume it’s because he sounds like a bad Jack Nicholson impersonator (or a very good Christian Slater impersonator). The remaining 4 aliens proceed with their invasion.  Their fearless leader Captain Blipto is hit by a car, leaving the remaining three on their own.

 The only people who seem to believe the alien invasion are the towns newest sheriff, his daughter, her new friend (dressed like a duck) the town deputy and an elder famer named Wrenchmuller. The sheriff’s daughter Kathy discovers the remaining three aliens as they accidentally pose as trick-or-treaters.

 Blipto (surviving the car’s impact) ends up taking a gas station attendant as his slave. They begin building a death machine. The Enforcer Drone decides to take things into it’s own (robotic) hands. The martians unite with the rest of the town in order to take down the Enforcer Drone and save the town.

 Spaced Invaders is a piece of 90’s sci-fi by numbers, but with a kid and comedy twist. The small town is very reminiscent of a film like Critters. In fact that’s the only place a film like this should take place. A few years later Hocus Pocus came out and did a MUCH better version of the evil beings confused by Halloween angle. But there’s still a lot of fun to be had with Spaced Invaders.

 

Dialogue wise the film doesn’t speak down to kids. Parents will find just as much to enjoy about this as kids will. There are subtle jokes that I completely missed as a kid but loved rewatching it in 2011. One particular sequence involves farmer Wrenchmuller getting frustrated about the foreclosure of his farm. Instead of screaming yelling he calmly starts to load his shotgun. This is occurring while the sheriff is having a conversation with the local credit union owner. I’m considerably shocked by how little the film actually has dated itself. There are however jokes that would never happen in a kid’s movie this day in age, such as the local town asshole giving trick or treaters cigarette cartons.

Performance wise some of these actors are better than they have any right being, specifically Wayne Alexander who plays the Gas attendant turned Robot Vern. His performance reminds me of Martin Short at his best. Sadly, Alexander’s career never really took off much outside of Babylon 5 appearances.

The star of the show is Gregg Berger’s over the top performance of Klembecker, the cruel credit union owner. His confusing wrestling costume and nonsensical screaming is everything an 80’s science fiction film needs. He’s so over the top that one of his lines of dialogue should be ‘Martians this is AMERICA. if you don’t like it you can geeeeeeet out!”

Spaced Invaders isn’t a great movie but it’s certainly not a bad movie. It seems that only a select group of kids growing up in the very early 90’s have ever heard of this film, which is a shame. It’s agelessness should make it a yearly television tradition for kids. I mean they still play Teen Witch every year and that shit is beyond dated.

 

When he’s not writing for Geekscape Matt Kelly is writing a in his blog Pure Mattitude, producing his podcast The Saint Mort Show and occasionally tweeting.