Audience Member
Oh this is the bomb! This is SO bad it's great! This needs to be a cult classic - midnight showings - dressing up - shouting out lines to the screen. Made with such sincerity - so very badly! The music - the styles - the magic!! BEST fist fights in the history of cinema!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/27/23
Full Review
Audience Member
"The Galaxy Invader" is another Don Dohler film: some of the awfulest movies ever made. It opens with Greg Dohler driving down a dark highway as David Harmon. He stops to watch a brilliant comet flash overhead and crash to earth. He's quite grown-up compared to young Scotty in "Fiend," who climbed down a Beech tree to follow Eric Longfellow as he rushed through the woods to meet, and murder, Dennis Frye.
Greg Dohler is joined by other Don Dohler regulars: Don Leifert as the opportunistic rogue, Frank Custer (IMDB has his name as Custor, but it's clear in the opening credits that the character name is Custer) and George Stover as the dim-witted J. J. Montague (a change from his usual role as a fiend or psychopath); as well as Richard Dyszel as Dr. William Tracy; Anne Frith as a cowering Ethel Montague; Kim (Dohler) Pfeiffer as Annie Montague; Steve Frith as a bar patron, and more.
Writer, producer and director Don Dohler doesn't seem to call New York casting to fill his films with actors, he uses family, earlier cast members, friends, neighbors and people he meets in the grocery store check-out line of his suburban Baltimore area home. It's just part of what it means to be a Don Dohler film (but every low budget filmmaker should take note).
Okay, to the story. David Harmon is driving down a country highway at night. A bright object flashes across the sky and explodes in the distance. It's a nice effect, and a big step up from some of the effects of prior films. David calls Dr. William Tracy, a scientist and perhaps college professor, who meets him 6 ours later (enough time to allow other events in the film to unfold). They set out to find the site of the crash.
Meanwhile two young married locals, quietly having breakfast (played by Michael Daines and Carol Crumbine, both with only this single IMDB credit), hear a noise in the basement. They go down and see the monster (our first view as well). It's an ugly green and scaly creature, and being true-blooded Americans, they try to kill it. But it defends itself, and kills the couple instead.
Not too far away in this small country community, Joe Montague (Richard Ruxton, a dead ringer for a hillbilly Jimmy Stewart, both in appearance and voice) is out chasing his daughter, Carol (played by Faye Tilles) who ran away from the dinner table over an argument about her boyfriend, a fellow who is way too smart and decent a guy for old Joe to tolerate. I know Jimmy Stewart didn't come in under an alias, but you'd swear he did.
Old Joe runs through the woods and across streams with his shotgun to get Carol back home -- he's just crazy enough to shoot her if she doesn't comply (everyone in America needs a gun for just such eventualities). He runs into the creature, instead, is able to capture its power orb, and goes home to call Custer (these are the days before cellphones). Custer can't hold back his glee. They'll all be rich when they capture him. Custer's fancy girlfriend, too.
There are, of course, many more runs through the woods in this Dohler formula film: a posse out to capture the invader; Dr. Tracy and David running through the woods with the invader after an escape; Carol grabbing the weapon from Dad and running through the woods to return it to the invader; Joe Montague and Frank Custer running through the woods to recapture the invader; and Ma, Carol, Michael, Annie and J. J. running through the woods to get them all to come to their senses.
And that leads to the final scene in the film. Everyone who hasn't already been shot meet up at the edge of a cliff, where Joe Montague manages to shoot and kill the galaxy invader, then proceeds after Michael as well. When he's just about to force Michael over the cliff, Ethel picks up her abusive husband's rifle and strikes him in the head. Over and over and over again -- all in slow motion to assure we all get the full effect.
The closing shot shows Ethel (and her children) standing triumphant of his body. A cowering woman is Ethel no longer; and perhaps the movie isn't about monsters and aliens at all. Perhaps it's a story of human redemption, and a brutalized wife who triumphs finally over her abusive husband.
A few technical notes:
Like the movies that preceded "The Galaxy Invader," a large part of the runtime (funny pun) is consumed by runs through the woods, usually until the protagonist, and almost everyone else, is dead. It's the element that turns a Don Dohler short into a feature.
The monster suit is certainly credible, good in fact, but not quite as good as the Nightbeast (in the audio commentary to the film, however, it is said to be much easier to get in and out of). Sadly, Glenn Barnes (Don Dohler's brother and a Dohler film regular) just didn't do much with it. He simply doesn't walk and move like anything other than a human in a monster suit, so the whole monster effect is lost.
Wardrobe leaves something to be desired. Joe Montague was depicted as a dirty, despicable old man, but amidst the squalor he created (more than his poor wife could clean up after), he wore a brand new set of very clean jeans, and a very spotless new white t-shirt, with a large hole in the front obviously cut with scissors. Equally strange is watching Carol running through the briars and brambles of the woods in a nice blouse, and a skirt with hemline several inches above her knees.
Continuity can be funny in any low-budget Dohler film. Perhaps the funniest here are in the scenes following the death of Custer, when Montague returns to his house to drink himself into a stupor on the living room couch. Every time the camera looks away, then comes back, there is a different brand of American beer on the table. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Budweiser, back and forth in turns.
Another disappointment: Don Dohler films are held out as genuine Triple-B movies (Blood, Boobs and Beast), but no boobs here, even though there were clear opportunities to introduce them. The film even has old Joe Montague nearly rip the clothes off of Vickie on the living room couch after the invader shoots Custer. It's been said that late in his film career (he died an early death at age 60), Dohler wanted to abandon the Boobs element of Triple-B, and had to be talked out of it by Joe Ripple and others, but it looks as if he wasn't interested in featuring boobs at the beginning of his career either.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment of the film, however, was how we are left with confusion as to whether the galaxy invader was a gentle, ET alien, or a rampant killing machine, like the aliens of "The Alien Factor" or "Nightbeast." He was, of course, just an ugly friendly alien, meaning harm to no one, and lost on a strange, unwelcoming planet when his space ship crashes in rural Maryland.
Final take? Three: 1) Despite expectations otherwise, this film didn't show a progression of storyline and filmmaking skill one would hope for, it follows a pretty rigid formula; 2) The film is nevertheless good, mindless fun on a Saturday night with beer and chips; and 3) "The Galaxy Invader," like the films that preceded it, can be instructive to new filmmakers. They show how you can organize a simple story and bring in the necessary cast, props and locations. Too, they show how you can go terribly wrong. Good lessons to learn.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/16/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Don Dohler's magnum opus. There's so much B movie horribleness in this movie that it's impossible not to love, right up until the very last shot. The characters are amazing, specifically the main character who drinks beer and goes after his daughter with a gun in the very first scene he's in. Some of the best schlock out there.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/26/23
Full Review
Audience Member
58%
Galaxy Invader is pure B-movie trash suitable enough for its laughs, even if the schlock factor is inconsistent.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/19/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Unfortunately for him, a green alien from another galaxy crash-lands in the middle of a county full of drunken rednecks who try to capture him, his white orb, and his advanced space gun/roman candle. At times this Don Dohler direct-to-VHS alien creature feature seems like it's about to become transcendentally stupid, but it never quite makes it over the just-kinda-stupid hump.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
02/08/23
Full Review
Audience Member
An insightful take on the human condition
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/31/23
Full Review
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