Starship Invasions [Import]

The title of the film basically tells you the whole plot, and I can tell you from the start it looks next to Star Wars, released the same year look like a Jaguar parked next to a rusted out Pinto. But then, keep in mind some people had some wonderful memories in Pintos <tho if they were in the back seat they woulda been at the chiropractor the next morning>.

Christopher Lee struggles his way through the dialogue and the special effects are on the level of a 1980s video arcade game...but wait!

With an open mind and a sense of fun, you are bound to have a great time watching it, especially with a bunch of friends <preferably drunk>. This may all sound sarcastic but, with the exception of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, never have I seen a film in a theatre where the audience cheered and participated to the fun of the battling flying saucers.

Though I may react differently if I were to see it for the first time now, the scene in which the aliens attempt to control the mind of a suburban Toronto housewife to slit her throat with a huge knife, shaking and struggling to fight the mind control, is one I will never forget.

Campy fun and suprisingly linear, if taken on it's own terms as Saturday afternoon fun, this movie is great though I doubt it would stand up to repeated viewing. Grab some friends, watch it on a big screen, see which one of you does the best Christopher Lee impersonations, keep the beer flowing and you will have a blast!

Okay, it sounds cool - and in a way it is. Sure, other movies have come and gone, their plots forgotten, there once innovative special effects overshadowed by niftier techniques in film-making. But watching "Starship" I feel pretty much as I did when I first saw it (age 8) - when I knew the special effects were not that special. Between "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters", sci-fi was again a-list movie material - meaning that flicks about flying saucers were going to require mire cash than the people working on "Starship" were willing to shell out. The vision of the movie is strikingly low - there's a robot that looks like it came from an episode of "Phantom Empire"; Ramses has his ships bombard Earth with cosmic rays that inspire mass suicides - even though he has enough ships to ravage Earth ala "ID4"; the interiors of flying saucers look like they were inspired by Sartre - a single spacious room free of any machinery to keep the ship, or the plot moving. Yet it was still fun - with its threadbare plot, I could never tell what direction the story was going, and its low production values gave it that sort of homespun feeling you can only get from sincerely independent movies. In short, "Starship Invasions" is only as enjoyable if you're willing to accept it as less a sci-fi epic than a really cool time machine capable of bringing you back to 1978.