Strange Invaders (1983)

One day, his ex-wife Margaret (Diana Scarwid) appears in the apartment of entomology docent Charles Bigelow (Paul Le Mat), their little daughter Elizabeth (Lulu Sylbert) in tow. There’s some sort of family problem, and she needs to return to the Midwest small town she grew up in. Charles agrees to take Elizabeth, of course, but when Margaret neither reappears nor phones for days, he and Elizabeth grow restless. After weeks have passed – a time during which all phone lines to the town Margaret is visiting are permanently unusable to boot – Charles decides to make the drive halfway around the country to find out what happened to his ex-wife.

Once he has arrived in beautiful Centerville, Illinois, things become increasingly peculiar. People there are rude, uninformative and  vaguely creepy, while the town itself still carries a heavy whiff of the 50s. More disturbing still is the fact that those people in town actually willing to talk to the stranger claim to never have heard of Margaret’s family. When Charles isn’t leaving immediately and pokes around the place a bit, the situation escalates in a not atypical series of events including a disappearing dog, a broke-down car, and mysteriously appearing and disappearing townsfolk. Eventually, Charles flees the town while a bug-eyed alien guy shoots lightning at his escape car.

Once returned to civilisation, our protagonist has a hell of a time finding anyone to believe him, be it friends, a lady from the government agency tasked with investigating strange occurrences (Louise Fletcher), or even tabloid reporter Betty Walker (Nancy Allen). And that really could be that, but these aliens clearly take security very seriously indeed, so Charles soon finds his home and office ransacked, and is threatened by various weird people. The aliens also start bothering Betty, finally winning Charles an ally as well as a love interest. Clearly, another visit to Centerville is in order.

As most people interested in cult cinema will probably know, what the 80s are to our era, the 50s were to the 80s themselves, with many a film taking heavy inspiration from pop cultural artefacts made thirty years earlier. As it is also today, this fixation can lead to a sort of lazy copyism, or to – often pretty inspired - reworkings that use elements of the old to make something new that uses looks, sounds and feelings of an earlier era and builds something different out of them.

Michael Laughlin’s Strange Invaders certainly belongs to the latter kind of film, using elements of 50s alien invasion movies, casting old school actors like June Lockhart and Kenneth Tobey (who turns out to be rather more excellent at being creepy than he ever was at being square-jawed), and including many an idea that could nearly have been borrowed from the past. At the same time, Laughlin does use many of these elements in ways the stiffer films of the 50s couldn’t have gotten away with, very companionably poking fun at the older films without anything here ever turning into outright satire or comedy. Rather, these moments in the film feel like nods for those in the audience who have seen the same films the filmmakers have.

There’s no heavy deconstruction of traditional genre tropes going on here anyway, mind you, for Laughlin’s really more interested in telling a traditional invasion plot in a slightly more contemporary manner, so if you expect a strong non-conformist subplot or something of the sort, you might be disappointed. Sometimes, an alien body snatcher is just an alien body snatcher rather than a metaphor for communism/anti-communism or whatever else floats your boat.

From a 2020 perspective, the film’s looking somewhat stranger than he will have played at the time, really giving me a bit of a double dose of nostalgia – one dose for the 50s movies the film itself feels a degree of nostalgia for, the other for the kind of mild 80s sf/horror this is, the sort of film made by filmmakers who shared many of the cultural influences and interests of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas but didn’t quite have the talent, or the luck, or the commercial instincts to make movies as accomplished or successful as these big boys of nerddom did.

Which doesn’t mean Laughlin’s a bad director. If you get used to Strange Invaders’ somewhat slow pace and are okay with a certain tendency to pull emotional punches where it would have been more effective to go for the gut, there’s a lot to enjoy here, starting with Louis Horvath’s typical (and very effective) early 80s photography (you’ll know pretty much how this will look if you have seen anything made in the first half of that decade; you’ll also know how pretty it looks), and certainly not ending with Laughlin’s love for tucking away little interesting details about characters somewhere in a scene’s background.

I’m also very happy about a film concerned with a deeply not macho Paul Le Mat as its hero, something that certainly wouldn’t have happened in the 50s (or quite a few parts of the 80s either). Le Mat’s not exactly a charisma bomb, but he plays his characters’ increasing frustration about the world’s disbelief as well as he shoes his deep well of courage when it comes down to it. From today’s perspective, Nancy Allen could really have rather more to do, but she’s also not standing around screaming all the time.

Last but not least, there is some really cool effects work on screen, with the ickily organic human masks in front of the also excellent alien faces as created by James Cummins being a particular high point; though the rest of the effects are lovely too.


All of which really adds up to a fun little film that evokes nostalgia without getting lost in it.