DUDE!!
You and me both. I saw HOHH when I was about 10 or so and had bad dreams for a week. I caught again about 20 years later on some late night creature feature and was ready to be scard all over again. It was one of old Vincent’s horror-comedies and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand how it had scared me so badly in the first place.
Eve
GREAT posting about Luz Potter.
Damn - how could we have forgotten those very crucial scenes?
Sure as we’ve said, the sucking sand pits (with creepy singing & music), the mutants, the drill thing in the back of the neck were all scary - but don’t you think the creepiest, scariest “thing” was that tentacled alien in that glass sphere?
WOAH that was creepy !!!
Thanks Eve. (I have a feeling I just might have nightmares tonight).
Woops my error. It seems MacTech already mentioned that scary tentacled monster in the globe. Sorry MacTech.
You forgot to follow the link (“Finally! A decent DVD is available for Invaders from Mars. Read Savant’s review”) at the top of that 1998 article, to a review of the Image Entertainment DVD release in 2002.
It Came From Outer Space features my favourite cheap startle of any film – and it really only works in 3D, insofar as it works at all.
Our heroes are walking through the creepy desert at night.
A sudden major chord on the soundtrack syncs with a quick cut to:
A JOSHUA TREE.
Heroine screams: “Aaaaaaaaaagh!”
‘The Professor’ from Gilligan’s Island: “Relax, it’s just a joshua tree.”
Classic.
I saw Invaders from Mars as a kid. It was interesting, but I didn’t have the reaction most people do to it.
Years later, I attended a screening of it at the theater at George Eastman House in Rochester. This is a classy joint – you can’t get popcorn or soda or candy. You can’t eat in the theater. People come to it all dressed up and they keep quiet during the films and your feet don’t stick to the floor. Peopl;e pepper their conversation with things like mise en scene and know the names of set designers. These people had come to watch a film directed by Cameron Menzies, and they were gonna enjoy it, by gosh.
So I was really surprised when they started talking back to the screen and making MST3K-like comments (years before MST3K existed) – behavior I’d never seen at this theater before, or since. I think everyone was just surprised at how bad the film was. Some of the dialogue is ludicrious! Mu-TANTS. The space scientist going on and on about how life on Mars must be, extrapolating absurdly from absolutely nothing.
Yeah, yeah, I know that the story is supposed to be “as told from a kid’s point of view” and is supposed to be filled with exagerrated imagery and kid-sized surreality, but it never really worked for me as a kid, and as an adult, despite the claims of enthusiasts for the film, it seems dumb.
Random notes:
1.) At the end they set timers for the explosives to blow up the Martian ship. If you time it, you see that the film really does take the right amount of time between setting and blowing up. One of the few filmd to do this. Unfortunately, it required a lot of padding to make that time work out right. Not a good sign.
2.) One of the guys in the Martian suits also played Gort in Day the Earth Stood Still.
3.) Menzies was art director on the original, silent version of Thief of Baghdad
4.) In the remake, you can see the head of the octopoid Martian leader, in its fishbowl, off in the background of the school basement.
5.) I’m concvinced they got Laraine Newman to play the Mom in the remake just so they could have her use her “Connie Conehead” voice at the end.
I happen to have owned one of those costumes, bought it at an auction in 1997 from Western Costume in Los Angeles for $15.00. It’s even cheesier in real life.
Fun movie though.