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Released by: Severin Films
Released on: June 27th, 2023.
Director: Juan Piquer Simón
Cast: Ian Sera, Nina Ferrer, Susana Bequer, Sara Palmer, Óscar Martín
Year: 1983
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Extra Terrestrial Visitors – Movie Review:
This film opens with an explosion in space before we see some sort of space rock fly through the cosmos only to land on Earth! A trio of poachers is out in the woods where the space rock lands, armed with rifles and crossbows, looking for a nest of nightingales’ eggs. When one guy gets bossy, another guy, Sam, says "Heil Hitler" when he's told to go get a ladder. Sam decides instead to take off in the truck. Anyway, we learn that a guy named Bill that they used to work with is now working with the Rangers. That'll be important later. Meanwhile, an annoying little kid is woken up in the middle of the night by a really loud kitten. He decides to look out the window through his telescope and sees psychedelic space weirdness followed by the space rock crash landing nearby.
Sam winds up at the crash site and after exploring it a bit finds a cavern full of giant alien eggs which he then decides to destroy with a stick, unaware that something is watching him and that something isn't happy with what he's doing. That something turns out to be a weird, furry alien and it gets loose in the woods after killing Sam.
Back to the annoying kid. His name is Tommy (Óscar Martín). He lives with his mom and his uncle Bill. He likes animals and bugs and finds one of the eggs. It hatches and he names it Trumpy. They become friends and Trumpy, it turns out, has a magic finger that can alter the very fabric of time itself. Trumpy also likes peanuts. Trumpy's sibling, however - the one that killed Sam - is still running around killing people.
Elsewhere, a rock band is recording an album. The engineers think the vocalist "isn't just good... he's the best!" His name is Rick (Ian Sera) which is kind of funny, because he sounds a bit like Rick Astley. The guy is a jerk though, he's insulting to his backing vocalists, especially Sharon (Nina Ferrer). Anyway, they all decide to get away for the weekend to a nearby forest, which brings them near the crash site and ties their story into the main narrative when one of them gets injured and they need to go to Tommy's house for help. Rick wears his best leather pants and eventually the rangers are called and obviously Bill (Manuel Pereiro) shows up. As the characters find themselves having to fend off a killer alien, they have to deal with a love triangle, the jerk poachers that aren't dead Sam and Tommy’s bizarre habits.
Directed by Juan Piquer Simón, who was also in charge of the effects work, Extra Terrestrial Visitors, also known as The Return Of E.T. and The Pod People (the Pod People version was lampooned on MST3K years ago), is pretty insane. It starts off borrowing a bit from Alien but mostly borrows from E.T. but at the same time, feels very much like its own unique blend of whatthefuckery. The movie definitely gets bonus points for mixing sci-fi, horror, terrible comedy, crazy sped up high speed footage of an alien moving rabbits around a room and scaring kittens, a bad rock band, leather pants, hand bands and gun toting rednecks into one seriously skewed but somehow also not so far off from reality ‘portrait of America.’
More ridiculous than the plot synopsis probably makes it sound, the movie goes at a nice clip, its eighty-four minutes are never dull. The score is as quirky and weird as a movie this quirky and weird deserves and the effects work created to bring Trumpy to life make the whole thing feel more than a little Muppety at times, except this Muppet has a sibling that wants to kill, or at least hurt, any humans that it comes across.
Extra Terrestrial Visitors – Blu-ray Review:
Taken from a brand new 4k scan of the original 35mm negative and presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition on a 50GB disc framed at 1.85.1 widescreen, Extra Terrestrial Visitors looks really nice on region free Blu-ray from Severin Films. Colors are reproduced nicely and black levels are solid. Detail is strong throughout and the picture always looks nice and filmic. There are no issues with any obvious noise reduction or edge enhancement and overall Severin Films has done a really nice job here. Compression is also handled well, which is important given how much of this movie takes place in weirdly lit foggy locals for some reason. There is a bit of minor print damage here and there that isn’t so tough to spot but the majority of the picture is quite clean.
Audio options are offered in 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 Mono in both English and Spanish language options. There are subtitles for the Spanish track and an English SDH option for the English track. Both options sound pretty decent, with the English dub getting the nod for being just a little bit goofier and therefore more entertaining than the Spanish track.
The biggest and best of the extras on the disc comes in the form of the one hundred and one minute featurette, The Simon’s Jigsaw: A Journey Into The Universe of Juan Piquer Simón. It's a pretty thorough look back at the life and career of the filmmaker that includes interviews with Victor Matellano, J. Luis Salvator Estebenez, Miguel Angel Plana, Antonio Mayans, Jack Taylor, Frank Brana, Pedro Del Ray, Reyes Abades, Carlos Puerto, Sergio Blasco, Manual Valencia, Domingo Lizcano, Hilda Fuchs, and quite a few others. It covers the influence of Paul Naschy and the Fu Manchu movies, as well as Catholicism and Biblical movies, his massive knowledge of genre films and books, his ability to finish a film with a low budget, what he was like to work with, his penchant for effects work in his movies, how popular his movies became and why people like them, what made his movie unique, how he had a good commercial eye, details about the making of some of the films he had a hand in creating and why his career remains important even after his passing. There are a lot of great clips and archival photos in here as well as a nice selection of storyboard art and other bits and pieces of ephemera.
But wait, there’s more! A Weekend In Hell is a new interview with actor Emilio Linder running fourteen minutes. In this piece, the actor speaks about how he got into movies and how he wound up in the film, the state of Spanish cinema in the seventies and eighties, working with the director first on Pieces before working with him again on this movie, working with Peter O'Toole and Donald Sutherland, having to work with English coaches on the movie, what it was like on set, memories from a few other movies he made such as The Rift, what Simón was like as a director and a person and unwittingly finding himself appearing in an X-rated movie after working with Jess Franco.
Composing The Cosmos interviews soundtrack composer Librado Pastor for nineteen minutes. He talks about how he got into music and his training, how he wound up composing film scores, what Simón was like to work with and their earlier collaborations, how he came to score Extra Terrestrial Visitors and his thoughts on what that entailed, how people have reacted to his scores at times, trying to bring ambient effects into the score and why the score for certain scenes turned out the way it did.
Complimenting this quite nicely is A Private Concert From Librado Pastor, which is a nine minute piece where he talks about some of the people he worked with on the score before then setting down and playing some of the music from it on his Korg.
Finishing up the extras on the Blu-ray are the two minute alternate Pod People opening credits sequence, menus and chapter selection options. Tucked inside the case alongside the Blu-ray, however, is the film’s entire soundtrack included on a bonus CD! The disc also comes packaged with some nice reversible cover sleeve art.
Extra Terrestrial Visitors - The Final Word:
Extra Terrestrial Visitors is one of those truly bizarre Eurocult oddities that could only have come out of the eighties era wherein ripping off Hollywood blockbusters seemed like a good idea and a solid business plan. At the same time, the movie has its own thing going on, and while it doesn’t seem to subscribe to any particular type of logic or care one whit for character development, it definitely does entertain. Severin Films are to be commended not only for bringing this beautiful turd to Blu-ray but in a special edition no less, with a documentary running longer than the feature itself serving as reason alone to want to pick this up.
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Extra Terrestrial Visitors Blu-ray screen caps!
