The Pod People: Juan Piquer Simon

Is it a slasher movie? Is it an alien invasion flick? Is it a lovable children's film? If you answered, "is it all three," then you are correct! Juan Piquer Simon's The Pod People is one of the most bizarre...things...that I have witnessed in years as a film critic. Originally, the film was supposed to be a run-of-the-mill slasher film about aliens. But then Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was released and made almost $800,000,000 million at the box office. So, before The Pod People was completed, the producers forced script alterations so that it would include an "adorable" relationship between a child and an alien. Only the relationship was anything but "adorable." The alien looked like a furry tapir. The child ended up being scarier than the alien. I'm not sure if The Pod People's producers realized that cute aliens and grisly murder do NOT mix. But the film has other problems as well. There are too many subplots: the child and the alien's relationship, a group of musicians who get lost in the woods, a group of poachers who discover mysterious eggs in a cave, and another alien that starts killing people. It's a cluttered, ugly, unintelligible film. I'm actually a little curious about what The Pod People would have been like if it had been allowed to remain a traditional horror film. But the few "horror" sequences like the discovery of the eggs and the murders are poorly blocked, badly shot, and are generally unpleasant to watch. Maybe the producers' intervention was a blessing in disguise: nobody's going to forget The Pod People now.

3/10