Too much of everything

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Without a doubt, one of the worst films I have ever seen. Every aspect of it is rotten: the cast, the acting, the music, the editing, the script...It wants to be a sci-fi/horror movie, but fails miserably. The "alien" takes the form of a red flashlight beam. There are many intercuts of people in a city frantically running away from colored smoke that is pouring from containers on the ground; the shots are re-used several times, and are inserted seemingly at random.The soundtrack is just a collection of library music. During one long scene, the music was too short, so it just stopped. Several seconds later, the snippet started again, played through, and then stopped. Seconds later, it was back...kind of like someone lifting the tone-arm from a vinyl record and replacing it at the beginning of a track.The cast mainly sits around a cabin in the snowy woods and talks aimlessly about what has happened. No one knows. Except that, maybe, Earth and Mars were once very close together and the Martians escaped to Earth and went underground, only to reappear as red flashlight beams 2000 years later.At the end, the last two survivors walk along snowy railroad tracks and then -- in the next shot -- become naked children skipping and frolicking through fields of flowers.Then the credits roll.And I am NOT making this up.

Six people are doing some research in a Canadian cabin. On the flight back they try to land at an airstrip, only to be shooed away by the one person left at the airport. The characters of the movie go back to the cabin to speculate what it all means. Is it a virus? An alien invasion? Both? They don't know. Unfortunately, because of lousy storytelling and incompetent directing the viewer isn't sure either. One thing is for sure. The next part of the movie will bore you to tears as uninteresting people mull around a boring cabin for the rest of the film.Again, a movie with good premise is horribly botched by Rebane. The sheer isolation and lack of information that the characters have could make for a very psychological thriller. Personality types could be explored in this setting. Tension could build leading to a dramatic climax. It doesn't happen. In all fairness to Rebane, his film the Alpha Incident does a nice job of this.So, what we are left with is a dwindling population of protagonists as they are, for some reason, disappearing. Finally, three are left. They hike to some town(Rhinelander, WI). Figure that out. I'm no Lewis and Clark but I think there's something closer to Canada. One more guy vanishes and we are left with Stan and Sara. And that's when the movie gets worse, if that's possible. For some reason they are turned into naked children and transported to a springtime meadow. I don't get it. Rebane probably didn't either, but hey, we need an ending.I usually enjoy the Bill Rebane films in spite of the their shortcomings, but this one was very hard to get through. The alien effects were terrible, even for 1974. The characters weren't bad but they were badly acted. The scenery was nice, so I guess there's that.Even if you like Rebane(I'm sure there's more crazy people like me), this one just doesn't hold up.

in that the ending makes no sense whatsoever.This film is parsecs away better than, say, Highlander 2 or UFO: Target Earth, but it doesn't have the naive charm of Rebane's Monster A Go-Go. It was just a mediocre SF film until the ending ... very seventies in characterization ... but with no real hints as to the real motivations of the "invaders", the ending makes no sense. If an invading force is killing everyone, why create (and I assume the invaders created them) a new Adam & Eve from the last two survivors from the lodge? I liked the claustrophobic feel of the lodge, and the presentation of the story came close to having the same feel of something like Night of the Living Dead or Invisible Invaders. But on the theme and story as a whole, it really wasn't pulled off right ... we the audience just didn't get the information we needed to figure things out either before or with the characters.

I'm the other bad-movie-loving friend EBA mentioned in his review of this natural disaster of a movie.He didn't do it justice. Not for lack of trying; it's easily at least as horrid as he makes it out to be, but there's just no way to make it sound as horrible as it really is. He's right when he says that there's no good way to convey through language how abominably bad the movie is. It's the rental video equivalent of the "Ancient Evils" Lovecraft wrote about: it's horrible beyond your imagination, and thus beyond your ability to conceptualize.I think the portions of my memory pertaining to this film have erased themselves, in a subconscious effort by my mind to stay sane.