Strong and Moving!

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely Fantastic

A Masterpiece!

WARNING: This review does not contain spoilers, as there is no discernible plot to spoil. I'm pleased to say that, as something of a connoisseur of bad films, this one goes straight into my top ten worst I've ever seen. Generally these films appear as one-offs. The crew manage to cobble together a script, borrow some equipment, find a local businessman with deep pockets to give them some cash and they make a movie. In this case, writer/director/producer Michael DeGaetano somehow managed to make three films! I sincerely hope (and seriously doubt) the others are better. As for "UFO:Target Earth", where does one start? -Characters constantly appearing out of nowhere with no description of who they are or why they are there.-A character begins to deliver a line and just...stops. Later,the same character blows a line but the take was kept.-Boom mics, camera tracks, out of sync audio, strange zooms and pans, jarring edits, time-shifts, .-A horrible prequel to the orgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally".-Characters standing half obscured by trees.-Constant rumbling crackle and pop in the soundtrack which I assume must have been real aliens desperately trying to stop the production for the sake of mankind.-Bad '70s music of every stripe, creepy electronic music for no reason whatsoever and I swear during the final scene, music stolen from much better films.-A General having a serious conversation while seated at his desk, twiddling a letter opener. No, wait...(pause)...THAT'S A BUTTER KNIFE! But the question that will bug me forever is this: Where did they get the power to run the equipment at the lake, and why choose to bring several televisions but Coleman lanterns instead of electric lights? The dialogue is trying desperately to be deep and meaningful, but the total lack of characterization and story line makes it laugh out loud funny.Some of my favorite lines: "I feel as though you are trying to bind my soul with your technology." "It's that light. No, it was like a big star.It was coming all...It was making me all naked". "That was just your waking star, son. Everyone has a waking star". (No, that's actually a desperate plea for help from an abused child.)"Somehow, I feel like I'm teetering on the edge of an enormous chasm of time, and space. It's a swaying sensation as if I was about to fall in." Hard to sum up the movie any better than that. The idea for the film isn't the worst I've ever seen, but this is one of the two or three most inept attempts at movie-making I've seen. And, yes, I've seen "Manos:The Hands Of Fate". If you like bad film, or just want to see what happens when a filmmaker leaves out every element necessary for a watchable movie, you should see this. Two stars, because it's too entertainingly bad to call "awful".

I kind of enjoyed the leisurely pace of the movie; it was sort of a nostalgic flashback to a time when movies moved slowly enough for me to absorb all elements in a scene, instead of flashing through at such a breakneck speed that much information is lost. It was a dopey movie with mostly inept acting and a dopey premise (the aliens' speeches at the end sounded like any given night on George Noory), but it wasn't totally a waste of time. The music was pleasant; the whole movie had a kind of amateurish charm to it. I wouldn't ever watch it again, but I don't regret the time I spent on it. I have sat through far worse. And it is a little time capsule of 1974.

UFO: Target Earth (1974) BOMB (out of 4) Incredibly stupid and silly sci-fi flick about a dorky young man who starts to investigate UFO's and then hears strange noises coming from a local lake where it was reported decades earlier that a spaceship crashed. This is a really stupid and really, really silly little film that doesn't have a single thing going for it. The movie runs under 80-minutes and for the life of me a story never starts. The film opens with various locals talking about their encounters with UFOs but even these stories are boring and what follows just gets even worse. The acting is off the map bad as is the direction and I swear my 3-year-old cousin could have came up with better dialogue. And let's not even talk about the special effects. The one interesting thing is that the ending somewhat resembles Close Encounters of the Third Kind and knowing Spielberg loves these types of films I'm rather curious if he had seen this or been influenced by it.

Terrible film, suffered from not just being long, and boring, but it appeared it was some kind of 16mm film, made by college students on a shoestring budget and transferred to 35mm-not an uncommon practice at the time for low-budget films, turned into potboilers for drive-in 2nd features. I remember it was "hyped" as a docudrama and double billed with The Devil's Triangle, another documentary that was narrated by Vincent Price and was at least,entertaining but both cashed in on,in then-1974, hype over UFOs and Bermuda Triangle lore. The plot is basically an electronics expert determines that strange signals may be coming from a rural area where he grew up-and a possible UFO crash site- at the bottom of a lake. The ship crashed possibly many years ago and it's occupants-or their psychic energies- have apparently been alive all that time and been attempting to communicate. An old-timer recalls when he was a boy, a "star falling into the lake". We never really see anything but an attempt is made to create a creepy, "too quiet" lake in many shots. The whole thing reeks of poor film-making-everyone in one shot, talking-lots of glib talking- as if they are reading the script, and extremely poor FX(what there are of them). Most seem to be just video tricks such as high contrast/video blending images of the alien's face on a monitor and a cheap bit of animation showing a ship in space-something like a dime store 2001. Interesting opening titles sequence with a strange but catchy electro-smooth "70's sounding" song called "Between The Attic and The Sky" and a montage of UFO photos we have all seen before. Everything is shot at night, or in a perpetual sunset-across-the-lake mode. This film oddly had a huge play in many areas in 1974, and wound up as a prime-time TV syndicated film the next year in many markets.