Three laughs: ETV - Extraterrestrial Visitors

 It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of themselves, and it is an even better pleasure to find some trash that keeps surprising you than watching most "quality" films. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.


Three laughs Case #11:
ETV - Extraterrestrial Visitors (Los nuevos extraterrestres, 1983)
Director: Juan Piquer Simón

One of my favorite trashy directors is the incredible Spanish hack Juan Piquer Simón. He started out by making an actually pretty good and creepy Exorcist rip-off Escalofrío, which opened doors for him to copy out whatever films were popular at the time and put his own twist to them. I've talked about the Dick Randall -produced slasher classic Pieces before. Coming hot off its heels is the ET-copying Extraterrestrial Visitors.

I think Simón started out by trying to do a horror version of Alien and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. Too bad an even bigger Spielberg film came out in the middle of the shoot and the producers demanded that Simón switch out his plans and make a family movie that cashes in on the lovable little alien, ET, and his friendship with a suburban little boy.

That's why this film is such a mishmash of two different flavours. It's pretty hilarious that the aliens are at the same time judo-chopping ALFs and magic-powered slumberland friends for every boy of a certain age. The film has two sub-plots, and the other features a group of teenagers in the woods getting killed one by one. The budget has got to be minimal, they didn't even have the dough to pay for blue lenses for night-time scenes, or sound effects to point out it's supposed to be stormy outside. Mostly there's just smog. Lots and lots of smoke.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. As an apparent meteor falls into a forest, we have three dumb-as-rocks hunters examining the wreckage. One of them finds a batch of glowing pink eggs in a cave. He proceeds to smash them with a big stick for no reason. But then he hears the soft growl of an off-sceen creature that apparently kills him. Rather than being a blood-curdling roar, the sound is more akin the Nurse Bear from BoJack Horseman waking from a nap. The weak sounds these aliens make never ceases to be hilarious to me during the movie.

2. Once we see the creatures about 40 minutes into the slow-as-glacier movie, they are basically midgets in fur suits with ridiculous dickfaced and pinheaded masks. One of them wanders to a campfire with the burly poachers, who try to capture the creature first by luring it closer with a charred rabbit's leg and then throwing a net over it and shooting it with a crossbow. It turns out that such mortal instruments have no effect on these Extraterrestrial Visitors. The hunters are done for.

3. But of course only the adult aliens are vicious. One hatches from a child's egg and turns out to be a deadeyed wannabe-ALF, and is named Trumpy by the ridiculously naive kid. To project its friendship, the alien proceeds to show off its magic powers by solving a puzzle in stop motion, making shoes dance in an astonishingly inane display and enhancing the kid's spyglass to show archive footage of African lions.