Los Nuevos
Extraterrestres aka The Pod People
Struggling to find the
movies we need is becoming more common as we get further through our list. This
is especially true of any non-American movies (I’ve been working for months to
try and get some of our upcoming movies after learning our lessons and having
to sub Danes Without a Clue and Yes Sir). Los Nuevos Extraterrestres, a
French/Spanish movie was no exception to this. However Mystery Science Theatre
3000 featured a movie called The Pod People, which kept coming up in our
searches and as luck would have it Los Nuevos Extraterrestres was a movie much
like Ator 2 - L’invincible Orion (see here), a movie of many names (it's also known as
El Retorno Del Extra
Terrestre). So once
again we had a slight reprieve and got to watch the MST3K version. Did we have
a lucky escape? Read on to find out…
Three poachers see a
meteorite crash in the woods and one of them decides to investigate. He soon
finds a glowing cave which is filled with eggs. Not seeing the potential profit
in a breakfast you can eat in the dark, he decides to go full Hulk and starts
to smash them. Just before he finishes he gets killed by an unseen assailant,
which then goes on a murderous rampage killing the other poachers and then
attacks a nearby pop band who’re on a camping trip. Meanwhile local boy Tommy (Oscar
Martin) finds the cave with its one remaining egg, which he takes home with
him. The egg soon hatches, and the creature that comes from it rapidly grows to
the same size as Tommy overnight. Tommy calls it Trumpy, as it has a long nose (and
possibly because Tommy suspects that he’s a massively incompetent, racist
fucktrumpet with shit hair). Trumpy makes Tommy’s toys fly about using
telekinesis and they soon become firm friends. It isn’t long before the band
end up at Tommy’s house seeking help after being attacked by Trumpy’s irate mother.
When they decide to go to the sheriff’s office to radio for help they stumble
across Trumpy’s mother again who is still looking for her revenge/egg/child.
Will Trumpy be reunited with its mother? Do murderous rampages run in the
family? Will Trumpy grow old and run for office by appealing to the most hate
filled people of the world? Will this movie ever make any sense at any point?
There are actually
reasons why this movie makes so little sense, and it looks like the director, Juan Piquer Simón, wasn’t to blame (although if he was so
dissatisfied with the end result, why he didn’t just Alan Smithee (see here for
an explanation on that if you don’t understand) the movie I don’t know. No,
this time it was down to the films producers wanting the movie to be changed
from a horror movie to a family friendly movie. I’m not quite sure why people
think that trying to change a movie into something else is a great idea, why
not just write another movie? But it seems that this is a practice that studio
execs think will work out just right this time, even if all those other times
this has been tried before have failed miserably.
So why did the producers want these
changes? Because ET was a worldwide smash hit and clearly taking a script for a
horror movie featuring an alien and shoehorning a young boy into it would
produce similar success. Like the previous ET cash-in we had to watch, Mac and
Me (see here), Los Nuevos
Extraterrestres misses the mark completely and instead of a heart-warming tale
of a boy and a lost alien, you get the tale of a murderous alien rampage
interspersed with scenes of some stop motion toys flying about to some evil
circus music, like they’re being controlled by The Evil Dead. Still at least it
didn’t feature Ronald MacDonald dancing, so it is a slight improvement over Mac
and Me.
To make matters worse,
they didn’t even make a cute looking alien. Instead they seem to think that a
meth addicted Clanger would be the ideal look for Trumpy. To make matters worse
his eyes glow brightly when he’s using his telekinetic powers, which just adds
to the creepyness of the whole look. Was this Simón’s
way of rebelling against his producers wishes and trying to ensure anyone who
watches this movie has nightmares of Wookies with anteater heads and torches
for eyes, eating all of their peanuts?
I do have to congratulate the person who
designed the movie poster seen at the top of this blog though. If there was
ever an Oscar for an attempt to fool you into seeing the wrong movie, then this
deserves it. Starting with the large ET initials to show yet another of this
films aliases, Extra-Terrestrial Visitors, and then using the (mis-leadingly
non-horrific) eyes and body shape combined to try to make it look like ET from
a distance (if someone has particularly bad eyesight that is), this is a
masterpiece of deception. It’s the poster equivalent of a badly forged note to your
teacher that you hope they’re too busy to look at properly so you don’t have to
do PE in the rain.
The dubbing in this movie is pretty bad
too. But for anyone who is a fan of 70s/80s European horror this is quite a
common thing. The voices always sound as though they come from the same
emotionless actors, who were once probably locked in a room together and not
let out until they’d dubbed every movie their captors saw fit to throw into the
room at them. They sound bored and are clearly reading straight from a script
without any attempt at acting the roles out. The boy doing the voice for Tommy
certainly sounded similar, and I think I recognize him from Burial Ground:
Nights of Terror and several Fulci movies (or possibly it’s just a very typical
little boy voice that voiceover actors do).
I would strongly
recommend watching the MST3K version of this movie if you’re curious, as it’s
highly entertaining. But Los Nuevos Extraterrestres is definitely not a film I
would recommend that you watch without Joel and the bots. It lacks any form of
proper coherent narrative and is just a plain bad movie in every respect. So
from me this is a definite NO vote for Trumpy in 2016.
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