Pod People!

Pod People, A.K.A. Extra Terrestrial Visitors (Los Nuevos Extraterrestres) (1983)

Runtime: 84 delirious minutes

Directed by: Juan Piquer Simon

Starring: Ian Serra, Nina Ferrer, Susana Bequer, Sara Palmer, Oscar Martin

From: Several different Spanish and French companies

Watching a restored version of Pod People was in fact a gas. It’s also not an atrocious movie… however, who was the film made for, exactly? Most are likely familiar w/ the (great) MST3K episode but this combines the cute little alien tropes w/ a young boy alongside a more serious picture involving poaching, adult relationship drama, and a full-sized alien that directly or indirectly kills people, featuring cursing, including an F-bomb!

As flawed as the movie is, I can still give some compliments. It has plenty of intentional & unintentional humor; that jerk Greg Louganis… er, I mean Rick and the cheating on his girlfriend… young boy Tommy’s budding entomology career, the creature being given the name TRUMPY-a moniker that for many will have negative connotations, for obvious reasons-the score that usually was synth and usually was cool (the songs, on the other hand… the one I’ll always know as Idiot Control Now is hysterical even after finally learning the correct lyrics via the captions), the charmingly mediocre at best acting, the foggy forest Spanish setting.

Be that as it may, the movie is still not good in terms of the performances, the dubbing, the plot, the logic. This gave Joel and the Bots plenty of material to riff on; combining those two disparate plots that were polar opposites in tone, age bracket, genre… it did not work. It is hysterical that Severin released a restored version on Blu-in fact, it does look much better than the potato vision that was on MST3K.

Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon will forever be famous for the totally inexplicable Pieces, which seems like it was made by Trumpy’s alien species. Pieces is much more entertaining than Extra Terrestrial Visitors, BTW. I’ll give Simon credit for creating more than one genre movie that’s famous—or perhaps “infamous” is more apt. The plans are for several horror films from Spain to be viewed then reviewed in the next two months.