Konterr Brilliant and touching

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

DigitalRevenantX7 It's not everyday you come across an el cheapo film that was released on video the same year you were born & that has been relatively obscure for most of those ensuing three decades. The Galaxy Invader is that film.An alien spacecraft crashes in the woods near a hick town, bearing an alien explorer who is intent on investigating the planet's life. What it doesn't know is that a young science student & his mentor are hot on its trail, intent on giving it some knowledge on Earth life. But they are at least six hours away so the scaly green creature will be on its own. Enter Joe Montague. Joe is a redneck who cheats on others & wears the same artfully-torn T-shirt all the time. He never takes it off. While chasing his adult daughter with a shotgun for insulting him after he orders her to stay away from her boyfriend, who happens to be the son of one of his scam victims, Joe comes across the creature & steals its power orb (which it needs to power its weapon). Joe brings back the orb & shows it to his good buddy, Frank Custor – the local swindler, who has a white-trash girlfriend & a rap sheet about as long as your arm. Together the pair talk some drunken bar patrons to go hunting for the alien & sell it to the government for some big bucks. But three problems come to the fore – first, the alien is packing enough heat to outclass all of them; second, the alien is being helped by the scientists on its tail; and third – and this one's a doozey – the alien has recovered its power orb from Joe's house & is intent on teaching this group of rednecks a much needed lesson on manners.Director Don Dohler was the editor of an old 1970s magazine titled Cinemagic, which taught the young filmmakers of the time on how to achieve good-looking el cheapo effects at no budget (reminds me of the DVD of the Astron-6 feature Father's Day, which showed them making a fake tyre iron out of rubber tubing, a coathanger & dark paint). His first film was the 1978 feature The Alien Factor, which was quite cheap but had some striking effects work done on it. Dohler would go on to make half a dozen films before dying in 2006, all of which were really cheap.The Galaxy Invader was one of the earliest Alien knock-offs around but unlike the vast majority of these films, took a very different path to the alien nasty story – make the alien a benign one. Add to that some bad characterisation (although the actors do the best they can with such poorly written material) & poor pacing & a dumb story. The alien creature itself looks really shabby – you have no doubt that the creature is simply an actor (Glenn Barnes) in a heavy two-piece rubber suit (with suspenders to hold it up) that looks really fake. But the eighties were a magical time where the production values of your average Doctor Who episodes of the era bled into the independent genre film industry half a globe away. The early Cybermen models looked much more convincing than The Galaxy Invader's alien & they looked really threadbare.The film is available on YouTube, as well as several el cheapo DVD releases, so watch it if you can. It'll be a laugh riot you'll enjoy, despite being rather dodgy in the technical area.

Allen H. Freeman, Jr. I usually get a kick out of cheesy sci-fi movies. I couldn't even find humor in this. There was very little technical quality. Many of the scenes were too dark. The background noise in the quiet outdoor scenes was distracting.The worst thing about the movie was the staging of the fight scenes. I wonder if the actors had any contact with each other during a fight scene. Reaction times were so slow. Each actor was at his or her own level, and these levels never changed. There was no range. Most of the delivery was either yelling or very quiet. There was no build-up. It was totally flat. This movie was a waste of time. It was painful to watch it.

Nullness Any superficial enjoyment the usual snarky MST3K crowd of Hollywood- pandering mall-snobs could find in an independent movie like Galaxy Invader should be abated a bit by how downright depressing it is. The alien is really only a plot device, a MacGuffin to propel the story into one dealing with human ignorance and greed, and an examination of the little tyrant of a dysfunctional family. This is one of the most bleak and depressing depictions of a family I have ever seen, with an enabler of a mother, a cowering, toady son, and two daughters that hate their father, who rules over all in a torn shirt that symbolizes his own ethical laziness and moral bankruptcy. There are some fine, funny scenes in Galaxy Invader, such as when a dummy spirals off a cliff at stunning velocity, but all the funny scenes are soured by what came before them, be it the senseless depravity carried out on an alien life form or the spectacle of a sweaty, enraged father wrestling to the death with his own son.The overall ambiance of Galaxy Invader is one of hopelessness and desperation. Where meeting an alien being should elicit a scene of joy and wonder, or in a Hollywood movie some schmaltzy E.T. crap, here in an independent feature we are given a vision of a close encounter that seems startlingly disturbing and ugly and born of dull dark reality, the beer-soaked jungles of gristly redneck life. The invader at the center of Galaxy Invader doesn't come from another planet: it comes from the galaxy of our own bitter, corrupt hearts.

Cristi_Ciopron With a story by Don Dohler, scored by Norman Noplock, THE GALAXY INVADER is an auteur movie by Don Dohler (--and many from the Dohler family seem to have contributed--); a Z movie doubtlessly, but an auteur movie nonetheless, as the Z cinema, the Z footage has its _auteurs, hacks intrepid enough to assume the whole steps of the movie-making.The costume of that asthmatic monster was beyond imagination. You see, movies like this one should compete for that 'worst ...' category.It deserves its disrepute.