Okay, so we’ll swipe an idea from John D. MacDonald’s “Wine of the Dreamers,” cross breed it with “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and add a little DNA from “Night of the Living Dead.” The aliens are not able to physically reach our planet but have been watching us telepathically ever since we exploded the first atomic bomb. They’ve come across a secret government project in the Western desert working on a superbomb based on quantum mechanics principles. The problem is that we’re messing with forces we don’t understand with our “stupid, stupid, stupid minds.” The bomb, if exploded, will so powerfully disrupt time and space at a quantum level (those of you who actually know something about physics, please go easy on me here; I’m not trying to come up with a real theory, just some kind of superficially convincing pseudo-scientific jargon) that it will become impossible for matter to exist anywhere in the universe.
Now the aliens can’t reach earth physically; but they can project an alien mind to earth, gain control of a human body at the moment of death and re-animate it to some degree. Once they’ve managed to do this, the newly-arrived mind can serve as a kind of conduit for other minds to arrive on our world. But they can’t stop the decay or deterioration of the bodies and have to exchange them every two or three days, sometimes after only a few hours, and sometimes they are in terrible physical pain. This means they generally have to kill people to get the fresh corpses that they need. And they are coming here in increasing numbers in the area surrounding the government’s secret base intending to storm the base with sheer numbers to prevent the test.
There is, however, another faction of aliens, perhaps from another planet altogether, who are trying to contact top scientists and government officials and warn them of the danger.
The aliens have tried different techniques to “break through” eight times before, but only with the ninth attempt have they succeeded in taking over a human body at the point of death. And now their first agent must go and kill others so that his comrades can have fresh corpses to inhabit … Of course, you could just re-title the thing and mention the original film in the credits: “Based on the shlock film classic ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ by Ed Wood Jr.” or something like that.
With this scheme you could minimize the need for special effects which keeps the budget low and still allow for some great visuals. Imagine an army of zombies tens of thousands strong in various early stages of decay storming the small military force guarding the project!
Okay, so it ain’t Shakespeare, but I think there’s the germ of an idea for a pretty good low budget comic book movie here. Might make a good made-for-tv project for the SciFi channel.
Wadday think? I actually feel some enthusiasm over this idea.