Extraterrestrial Visitors (1983)

Overrated and overhyped

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

First off, the title is rather misleading. There are no pods in this movie. There are plenty of people though. There's Tommy, a little boy who lives with his mom and his perpetually cranky uncle in a house in the woods. And there are poachers who get stranded in the woods when their driver bails on them. Plus there's a teenage rock band that goes camping in these same woods, and also becomes stranded when an unseen landslide blocks the road. We first meet them as they're recording their latest track, 'Hear the Engines Roll Now', sung so badly that it sounds like 'Idiot Control Now.' Even the lead singer, when asked what he thought of their session replied "It stinks." He could have been talking about the whole movie.None of the people I've just mentioned are given much in the way of personality, brains, or motivation, and as a result I was unable to care about any of them. But at least they're better than the monster, which looks like someone crossed Greedo and Alf, and added an elephant's trunk. Actually, there are two monsters. One hatches from an egg that Tommy finds in the forest, and is named Trumpy, probably a reference to his enormous schnoz. It turns out that Trumpy can "do magic things" which he shares with Tommy in scenes that are clearly meant to rip-off E.T.Meanwhile, in the forests outside, Trumpy's mom is searching for him, and killing everyone she meets. She/it racks up quite a body count before the movie is over. The monster's attacks here are among the least exciting I've ever seen, but I do wish the pace of the killings had been sped up, because then there would be no more characters and the movie could be over sooner. And speaking of ending sooner, it takes a full half-hour before we even see Trumpy. Until then the movie keeps jumping back and forth between the teens, the poachers, and Tommy until we're not sure that we're still in the same movie.This is partly to blame on the slipshod editing, which jumps between settings with no transitions or reason for doing so. It's like the movie doesn't have the attention span to stay with any one group for more than a few moments. And the technical and stylistic issues don't end there. The photography is rather grainy and the colors largely muted, and most outdoor scenes are obscured by thick clouds of fog. I don't know if I've ever seen so much fog in my life, at least not on land. And there's an annoying new-age soundtrack. Most puzzling is the credits. Both the opening and closing credits are accompanied by incredibly out-of-focus footage from an entirely different monster movie. What the hell? Overall, Pod People reeks of cheapness, with no sign of talent by anyone involved on the project. It tries to be both a chilling horror film and a heart-warming children's tale, and it fails miserably on both counts.

A little boy who has an extensive array of pets he likes to call "specimens" finds an alien egg to hatch, somewhat like Horton. The creature manages to use his snout to suck up peanuts and warp time and space with his fingers.Director J. P. Simon is known for his slasher "Pieces" and horror gem "Slugs". I like to think the puzzle pieces in this one were a reference to his earlier work. Maybe not, but it adds something to the picture for me.This is a terrible movie ("it stinks") and there is no denying it -- even Simon thinks so. But somehow it has gotten to be #18 on the worst movies of all time on IMDb and that is just wrong. "Final Sacrifice" should be seen as worse. "Hell's Threshold" should be, too. A bit of editing and this could be a workable movie.

Reading the IMDb plot summary, I immediately thought "oh no, not another ET knock-off"(like the awful Mac and Me). The kid has clear enthusiasm and not too cloying and the sets have an interesting surrealism to them, other than that The Pod People- The New Terrestrials by the way is a much better title, this one didn't make sense- was painful viewing. Admittedly there were some unintentionally funny moments, but partly after seeing MST3K riffing the movie so brilliantly. The Pod People is haphazardly shot and has a bacon-slicer-edited look to it. While Trumpy looks part-badly-rendered-Muppet, part-oversized-teddy-bear, part-weird-looking-toy-elephant and part-teletubby. If you're wondering why I wrote all this, it's because I have no idea what Trumpy looked like, he was supposed to be an extra-terrestrial/alien but didn't even look like one. The soundtrack is too loudly mixed, is over-utilised and orchestrated in a way that makes it firmly rooted in the 80s. It worked for one subplot in the entire movie, the rest of the movie there was not much point to it and it was far too obtrusive overall. The dialogue is incredibly dumb, there are some real howlers scattered in the movie and that's where most of the unintentional humour comes from. The story is also a complete shambles, the basic story itself is a knock-off of ET, and nowhere near as sweet and poignant, and in an attempt to not make it seem so there are also 3 or 4 other subplots that were not only an utter muddle- they randomly skip between one another with no reason at all- but I felt as if I was watching several different movies in one. Don't look for likable characters either, the boy is alright but the rest are either jerks or literal-doormats, and that's when some of the subplots are not killing them off. Trumpy(what were they thinking coming up with that name?), because of the design and how he behaves, isn't endearing in the least. The acting is practically non-existent except for the boy, and the dubbing often is creepy-sounding. To conclude, painful but with unintentional entertainment value. The boy and the sets are the halfway decent things, and I'd hardly call them amazing. 1/10 Bethany Cox

"It has everything to do with hurting"."Pod People" is an abysmal film. It not only has the sort of identity crisis that one has a hard time believing (it is, quite literally, a mixture of the evil invaders from space and "E.T."), and it is really painful to sit through. I actually don't think there's one second of solid direction, one second of good acting, one half-decent line of dialogue. It's that terrible.The MST3k episode is wonderful though, featuring some really inspired riffs and skits. It's not one of my favorites, but still a great episode. I have only seen "Pod People" once without the MST3k help and it is genuinely quite impossible to sit through. I fell asleep twice or thrice.I do have to give the movie credit for giving us Trumpy, arguably the most ludicrously designed alien of all time, and by God that kid, Tommy, is the most annoying thing to appear in a film. If I was Trumpy I would have killed that kid much before the girl in the shower.1/10