Highly Overrated But Still Good

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The story in this film is that somewhere in Sweden there is a meteor crash. Only it's not a meteor, it's a space ship. And it has some sort of alien animal in it, probably called Laika. Hapless "investigators" of the meteor, together with a ridiculously good looking girl (her acting is equally ridiculous at times), come into conflict with the animal. The end is reminiscent of Frankenstein.I can't say I didn't enjoy the film. It has some sort of flirting going on between sexy American girl and manly Swedish skier, a funny looking alien animal and some scenes that were really hilarious, like the one where the aliens appear and each one has a separate eerie tone associated with their appearance on the screen.Bottom line: not completely awful, but quite a waste of time.

This hauntingly atmospheric monster flick was one of my favorite creature features on Saturday afternoon TV when I was kid. It was known as "Invasion of the Animal People" (a great title, in my opinion - sleazemeister distributor Jerry Warren deserves credit). The talky and inane tacked-on beginning, while unnecessary, doesn't take up enough time to detract from the film's crude, grainy, and ultimately mesmerizing beauty. A UFO lands in the snows of Lappland, and its bald, telepathic (?) occupants accidentally unleash their twenty-foot tall hairy humanoid pet. The latter then terrorizes the local Sami as well as Swedish cross-country skiers. The on-location Arctic locales give the film a look and feel which is unique in drive-in horror history.

Invasion of the Animal People (1962) * (out of 4) A brief introduction to director Jerry Warren who is the worst in my opinion. Warren would buy foreign movies, cut out the dialogue scenes and then add newly directed scenes so that he could then sell the movie off as his own. These added scenes usually have nothing to do with the "original" movie scenes surrounding them but that can sometimes add to the charm. This film was originally a Swedish production called Terror in the Midnight Sun but Warren chopped it up, added a few scenes with John Carradine and had him serve as the narrator. A spaceship crashes in the mountains and out gets a huge, hairy creature who stalks some scientists. The look of the creature is certainly dumb enough to get a few laughs but this doesn't happen until the final ten minutes and what follows that is pretty hard to get though. Slow, boring, stupid and simply badly made. The added scenes are equally poor. However, it must be said that this is still a lot better than Warren's Attack of the Mayan Mummy and Frankenstein Island.

If you like watching a bunch of people skiing around, you'll love this. An alien saucer lands in the opening round of the movie, and just sits there for about an hour of film running time before anything else involving it happens.I saw this on one of those late night live-monster host shows, and the riffs the guy did kept the movie from being pretty boring. There's some scientists that want to see the "meteor" that came down, a romance between a couple who flirt on the ski runs, and some other folks that do a reenactment of the mob scene from Frankenstein. You have to wait a long time to see the creature, a really really big hairy guy with ugly teeth, and his brief scene is pretty campy. Still, I liked the Jolly Neanderthal Giant. As for aliens, they show up only once too, just staring at somebody. (One is seen a couple of times from the back, always watching TV).Innocently silly and mildly amusing. There's loose ends at the end deliberately left for you to ponder. Or laugh at.