Thanks for the memories!

People are voting emotionally.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The acting in this movie is really good.

I thought "Zonta, The Thing from Venus" (1966) was the worst movie ever made in the history of cinematography, then along came this movie which lowered the bar even further. When Alan stares out of the window at the storm it reminded me of the films where the monster jumps up in front of window and scares the bejesus out of every one but I contained my laughter. At the bar scene where Vivien grabs hold of Alan's hands and does some deep breathing I was reminded of the cafe orgasm scene in "When Harry Met Sally" but I contained my laughter. Then Dr Mansfield kept switching ears when talking on the phone, probably deciding which ear was the most photogenic, I contained my laughter. The scene where Dr Mansfield said that when a circle is drawn the ends meet I thought well, if the ends don't meet it isn't a circle but I didn't laugh. When Alan said that electricity was power I thought, shoot!, there goes my theory that little men inside appliances powered them, but I didn't laugh. Mind you, it was near impossible not to laugh when the boom mic was shown in all its glory but, no, I didn't laugh. It was when Dr Mansfield's assistant dragged the skeleton out of the lake and looked deep and meaningfully at the skull I thought he was going to do a "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well" routine. That was when I lost it and laughed .... until I stopped.

The abysmal rating this film has is completely undeserved, if you view it in the context of other UFO films of that period and in the context of SF films generally. You cannot tell me that Spielberg and those guys didn't watch this film before they did the big extravaganza, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, three years later. This film has a low budget, and the characters and the plot are poorly developed. It also contains a closing scene that is a pathetic attempt to emulate Kubrick's masterful SF film -- I know, I know. But, it's not in the IMDb 2 range. It deserves more -- not a whole lot more, but a little more. It's a fun film to watch on a Saturday afternoon, if you have nothing else to do and you can manage to keep your expectations suitably low.

To say this movie is terrible is not only an insult to the word "terrible," it's also not quite accurate. I mean, don't get me wrong, it is terrible, but it's terrible in its own unique way. You've never seen terrible quite like this, and if you're lucky, you never well.The characters are colorless, the story (if I may be so bold) slow-moving, the cinematography is murky and the camera work inexplicable. Just as an example, there are extreme close-ups and sudden shock zooms when nothing is happening on screen. The acting is competent, though it's hard to tell, given the script. The lead guy, who sounds like Kyle McLaughlin, reads his lines without any trouble. The others are just kind of there, except for the woman who plays the professor. She really bites the cake with her awful flat acting, easily outdistancing everyone else in smashing any interest into a thin, watery paste.What really stands out, though, is the dialog. Not since Edward D. Wood, Jr, has such utter blather been essayed about with such abandon. In fairness to Mr. Wood, at least his dialog had some relevance to the story. Here, there are endless, pointless discussions about everything under the sun, only occasionally straying into relevant territory. "Would you like a donut?" "Can anyone really ever 'have' a donut? Don't we actually just take one more moment from a happy childhood and cloak it in our concept of 'donut'?" That's not actual dialog from the film, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deleted scene out there....The whole film strikes me as a movie made by someone who had never actually seen a movie, but had heard them mentioned casually by other people from time to time. One day, this person comes across a camera abandoned in the woods. Rather than tell a story, he just films his friends saying things. He invites them on a camping holiday and films them saying some more things. He gets a couple of them jump into the lake, because he'd heard people did those sorts of things in movies.Really, the level of ineptitude on display is astonishing--unbelievable, almost. You would have to work hard to reach these heights (or depths) and I don't think anyone connected to this worked that hard. Thus, the incredible ending strikes me not so much as an obvious rip-off of "2001" but rather an attempt to remake that ending after only being told an incomplete, rambling description by someone who'd seen it while drunk.

This is an incredible movie. It's not got everything! No plot, no tension, no character (let alone character development) - what it HAS got is a virtuoso display of incredibly bad direction and a script that gives the word meaningless a new... er... meaning.I suspect the director must have once had the concept of the Line of Interest (or the Centre Line, Director's Line call it what you will*) explained to him at some time but either forgot it almost immediately or just didn't get it because the camera is plonked down any old place and they shot whatever came into the viewfinder. Several times we get to watch people have long telephone conversations, but only from one end so we get to watch them say things like: "Yes I know all that." without having any idea what they have just been told. There are boom mikes in shot, tracks clearly visible, the DP does a great line in camera flares over people's faces and the sound levels are all over the place whole swathes of "dialogue" obscured by lousy songs. Though to be fair the sound problems may just be the quality of the DVD copy I saw; there was a lot of extraneous noise on the soundtrack (the songs ARE pretty sh1tty though). The script is bizarre; I honestly had no idea what was going on for the entire length of the film.The film opens with 3 minutes of mocumentary footage of people relating UFO experiences to a TV reporter. Then the opening credits (which were illegible on the copy I watched). Open on a young man trying to make a phone call then a portentous Voice Over (a la Ed Wood) tells us this young man is about to overhear something that will change his life forever. He somehow accidentally overhears two military types authorising a scramble of jets to investigate a UFO. The young man stares out of the window for a long time then phones someone else to make an appointment with someone else who turns out to be a psychic UFO spotter (or something). He then goes to meet his professor who lectures him (and us) at great length about the possibility of Life in the Universe. He goes to see 'Dr Mansfield' (whoever she is, we aren't told) and they have a conversation that really started the 'What the hell are they talking about?' ball rolling. The last line of the scene is "When a circle is drawn - they meet." Work backwards from there. After that it was a downhill slide into utter incomprehensibility. Ending in a low rent 2001: A Space Odyssey rip-off and the final bars of Khachaturian's Spartacus playing as the alien's space ship, trapped under a lake for a thousand years, zooms off to the stars powered only by Alan's imagination. Yep, you read that right, a bunch of aliens sat at the bottom of a lake for a thousand years waiting for a bad actor with a bald wig on to come and power their spaceship with his imagination. Insane.Favourite shot: Vivian and Alan sit in the back of the van excitedly telling each other some incomprehensible facts that are supposed to make the audience sit up and pay attention. They stop and the camera slowly zooms out leaving two bad actors sitting there waiting for the director to shout 'cut'. Luckily a huge lens flare obliterates them for most of it so we don't have to see them suffer too much.Favourite lines (favourite as in they made more sense than most. Three whole lines before I went WTF? ) Prof: What do we know about electricity?Alan: We know it's an energy source.Prof: Like the imagination.This is sublime stuff. Thoroughly recommended as a true awful classic. Seven out of ten on the Awfulometer. * An imaginary line drawn between two or more actors (and / or objects). Keeping the camera on one side of that line for several angles on one scene will allow those shots to be edited together with ease. Cross the line during shooting and you start having real problems as the on screen relationship between characters changes. Edit between the two and you get characters swapping places with each other and jumping from left to right of each other etc. Trust me, it's an easy concept to grasp, I'm just not explaining it very well.