Movie » Alien Invasion Movies

Director Tim Burton unleashes MARS ATTACKS! a vicious affectionate brightly-colored homage to 1950s alien invasion movies. When a shiny silver flying saucer lands in the Nevada desert a group of skull-faced Martians exit the gleaming craft. Although they claim to be peaceful they promptly "vaporize" a gathering of unfortunate Earthlings kicking off a bizarre high-tech war with wild special effects. This studiously campy sci-fi spoof based on a series of Topps bubble-gum cards gleefully parodies not only schlock B-horror movies but also overblown blockbusters such as INDEPENDENCE DAY. This subversive film is helped along by an all-star cast including Jack Nicholson in dual roles as both a clueless U.S. President with First Lady Glenn Close and a Las Vegas sleazebag. The film follows the wacky WAR OF THE WORLDS-like proceedings from the points of view of numerous colorful characters from the inane U.S. Press Secretary Martin Short to a trailer-park family Lukas Haas and Sylvia Sidney to singer Tom Jones as hims

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A moody quite violent sci-fi thriller about vampires from outer space who prey on the denizens of London. Based on Colin Wilson's novel "Space Vampires." The expanded foreign version contains an extra sixteen minutes of footage.

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Star Wars meets A Wrinkle in Time in this adventure of an intergalactic war and one unassuming young man who holds the key to dimensional travel, the legacy of his mysterious adventurer father. Boyish Josh Charles is the lucky Luke Skywalker stand-in, a good-natured underachiever shocked out of his lovelorn moping when gorgeous guerrilla fighter Andrea Roth takes the battle to his bedroom. Rutger Hauer is the coffee-chugging freedom fighter who is roused from retirement to fill out the trio and face dimensional mob boss Stuart Wilson to settle the fate of the universe. This obviously low budget picture makes the most of limited special effects and striking settings--notably an elevator ride that turns into a free-floating mind game hanging in space and a knock-down, drag-out finale that sends our hapless hero popping up all over the universe. Hauer makes for a surprisingly charismatic mercenary turned father figure and Charles is modestly charming, once he loses the smart-ass wisecracks. Though it reaches for a scope that's beyond its means, Crossworlds is an entertaining bit of sci-fi fluff. --Sean Axmaker

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FIRE IN THE SKY is the comprehensive story of a logger named Travis Walton who mysteriously disappears in 1975 only to turn up bloodied and bruised five days later. Walton and co-workers accidentally discover a UFO and unfortunately they all escape except Walton who is elevated aboard the bizarre aircraft. Onboard he undergoes painful unearthly medical treatments and tests.

Gaaaaaaaargh! The guy in the rubber suit is back with a vengeance. Godzilla's back in the nurturing hands of Toho Studios, and they've beefed up the big beast with more highly developed spinal fins, resembling large crystals, and more menacing teeth. But he's the same guy in the rubber suit who smashes Tokyo's buildings and cars and dukes it out in larger-than-life smackdowns with the universe's monstrous villains. The plot is familiar to anyone who was a 12-year-old boy: Godzilla erupts from the sea for reasons that are never made clear, proceeds to wreak havoc amongst the buildings of a model city, and meets and beats a monster his own size, thus saving humanity. His nemesis this time around is a 600-foot-long rock that scientists find at the bottom of the ocean and unwisely bring to the surface, where it proves to be an alien spacecraft bent on acquiring Godzilla's regenerative abilities. "A visitor from outer space?" exclaims one of the scientists, "My god, it's just too crazy to believe!" To which the lead scientist responds, "Right, like Godzilla's normal. Anyway, it's my theory that..." The film is thoroughly entertaining, and not just for the breathtaking sequences of destruction that follow Godzilla's emergence and his battles with the alien space monster. These do have a preternatural beauty. But the human story, if you can call it that, holds your interest due to the shear preponderance of improbabilities it generates. You laugh at the "mistakes"--assuming they weren't planted there as amiable self-deprecation. --Jim Gay