The Extravagantly Awful 1978 Cheapie The Alien Factor is Quite Poor
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Sometimes a movie will fall so fascinatingly short of even the most lenient standards of basic competence that it veers into the realm of outsider art. That’s true of The Alien Factor, a hypnotically abysmal science fiction/horror cheapie that was filmed in 1972 but wasn’t released until 1978.
To even call The Alien Factor a movie feels overly generous. It can more accurately be deemed a failed attempt at genre filmmaking from filmmakers with little in the way of resources, money, ambition or talent.
In The Alien Factor an alien ship carrying three animals from throughout the galaxy to a space zoo crash lands in a small Maryland town. The monsters escape and begin very slowly, awkwardly menacing a town that does not appear prepared for any crisis, let alone a half-assed, low-budget alien invasion.
The film is set in one of those movie small towns where everybody knows one another and everybody’s else’s business, where the mayor seemingly interacts with all of his constituents on a daily basis.
The movie’s monsters are generally of the extraterrestrial variety but its conception of capitalism is monstrous in its own right. When a low-budget alien who looks like the gimp covered in muddy duct tape with a vaguely insectoid visage kills a man and injures a pair necking at make-out spot, law enforcement assumes a bear or bobcat is responsible.
clearly a bear or a bobcat or something!
Nobody wants to assume that people are being killed by aliens rather than animals, even if they are in a movie called The Alien Factor. It doesn’t take long for news of the killing to spread throughout the town.
The Alien Factor is full of developments that utterly fail to pay off in any way and characters that serve no purpose beyond helping the movie nudge just past the seventy-five minute mark to feature length.
A trio of red-blooded youths, for example, take it upon themselves to kill the bear or bobcat themselves. The leader wants to bring a girl along with them. He insists, “She’s a cool chick and we’re going to take her with us” over the strenuous objection of his misogynistic compatriots, who don’t think she’s a cool chick at all and don’t want to take her with them.
It ends up being a moot point because the would-be bobcat or bear killers meet up with an alien who kills them almost immediately. The Alien Factor also has perhaps cinema’s first and last aunt and nephew coroner team.
Why are the scholarly types who determine that the killings are the work of a wild animal of some sort related? I have no idea, just as I don’t know why the filmmakers decided to favor audiences with three and a half minutes of the psychedelic rock band Atlantis performing one of their surrealistic ditties, with a frontman who looks uncannily like Austin Powers?
Again, I have no idea but these strange, strong choices lend the film a sense of personality and eccentricity that sets it apart from more generic low-budget fare about killers from beyond who look unmistakably like extras in cheap costumes.
The Sheriff wants to bring in the big guns but the Mayor has a fifty million dollar deal to build an entertainment complex at the edge of town that will pump big bucks into the small town and doesn’t want to do anything that might queer the deal, like conceding that the town has a killer alien problem it is patently unequipped to deal with.
The Alien Factor sometimes suggests Jaws if the Steven Spielberg classic were alien-themed and made for about a hundred dollars by complete incompetents. The Mayor’s unwillingness to deal with his town’s alien problem recall the Jaws’ mayor underplaying Amity’s shark problem to a dangerous degree.
About forty minutes in The Alien Factor’s take on Robert Shaw’s Quint shows up unexpectedly in the husky, mustachioed form of Ben Zachary (Don Leifert). Zachary introduces himself by saying that’s he’s someone who has devoted his life to studying strange phenomena and also that he’s “somewhat of an adventurer.”
Incidentally I’m going to start introducing myself as a writer, podcaster, author and also somewhat of an adventurer. The charismatic, strong-willed stranger then explains exactly what’s happened, using information an alien pilot gave him shortly before dying.
ACTION-how you like it!
The pilot was transporting alien animals for a space zoo that crashed with three dangerous creatures on board, two of which are brainless animals, creatures of pure instinct, and the third of which is highly intelligent and evolved.
There’s no real rhyme or reason to the film’s alien attacks. The half-assed extra-terrestrials just sort of show up in wooded areas and lurch about in an ostensibly terrifying manner. An alien who looks like a cross between a woolly mammoth, a satyr and a brown Sleestak on stilts looks like he’s on the verge of topping gracelessly to the ground.
The idiot residents of the small town are understandably flummoxed but Ben Zachary knows exactly what to do. He casually explains that he’s got some gizmos and doo-hickeys and whatnots that will help the town deal with its unfortunate alien problem.
The townspeople immediately accept that this wackadoo weirdo they’ve never seen before is apparently the world’s greatest expert in killing aliens. It’s always nice when a solution presents itself to a problem you didn’t even know you had, like killer aliens.
Ben tangles with the final and most impressive-looking alien, a dino type who appears super-imposed over the rest of the action in a way that makes it seem like he and Ben are never in the same universe, let alone the same frame.
The Alien Factor ends with Ben admitting what should be obvious from his introduction: he’s a super-smart, super-human, alien hunter because he himself is a space alien tasked with killing the runaway space aliens.
This ends on a surprisingly bummer note, with Ben, now in his hideous alien form, getting murdered by the pigs because they think he’s a bad alien. I assumed that that would be the end not just for the movie but for its creator’s career but he kept making movies, including a 2001 sequel to a movie that very aggressively never needed to get made in the first place.
Stylistically, The Alien Factor reminded me a lot of Manos: The Hands of Fate in its oddly hypnotic amateurism and total incompetence but it’s nowhere near as entertainingly insane or misguided.
I experienced some guilty pleasure laughing at The Alien Factor but I would be lying if I said that its seventy-seven minutes passed painlessly. This is a VERY bad movie in a way that’s only a moderate amount of fun.
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