The new movie Alien Trespass, which opens this weekend after a happy tour of the festival circuit, has been getting a fair amount of attention for its affectionate, deadpan simulation of a '50s aliens-attack sci-fi movie. We have been down this path before, of course, and there just might have been more of a point to it the first time. In 1983, director Michael Laughlin got his mock-'50s B-movie groove on with Strange Invaders, an unholy brew of campy nostalgia and sci-fi satire starring Paul Le Mat as a college professor whose ex-wife (Diana Scarwid) disappears after returning to her home town--Centerville, Illinois--for a funeral. After getting the brush-off from a government agency headed by Nurse Ratched herself, Louise Fletcher, Le Mat visits Centerville, which turns out to be a creepy little burg that exists in a time warp: in terms of fashion and other surface appearances, the 1950s are still going strong there. It turns out that the town, which is officially listed as having been wiped off the map by a tornado in 1958, was actually colonized by extraterrestrials, including Scarwid. The aliens, who are preparing to leave--and who intend to take Le Mat and Scarwid's small daughter with them--are ugly fuckers who go about their daily routine disguised in latex masks; when they rip them off, what's underneath looks like the faces of the white trash relatives who E.T. didn't talk about. (The movie, which came out a year after E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, includes a throwaway joke when Le Mat flips through a sheaf of photos of possible aliens, one of whom is Steven Spielberg.)

The movie, which can be found posted at YouTube, and which was issued on DVD a few years back as a double bill with Tobe Hooper's 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars, another '50s creature feature throwback (which also features Louise Fletcher breaking the needle on the Creep Out-a-Meter), has an arch, stilted look that can get on your Hooksexups but that also captures the feel of an old B-movie while inducing a sense of dislocation in the viewer. It's both a comment on an earlier era and a product of its own: the early 1980s, when a lot of politicians were basing their careers on a pledge to bring back the 1950s, and some of the biggest movie hits, such as Footloose, seemed to be set in a mythical America where they never really went away. The not-quite-right connection between the aliens' frozen '50s style and the world around them turns into a recurring joke: when an alien enforcer (Fiona Lewis) has to leave her safe haven, people admire her retro-chic look. Besides such people as Le Mat, Lewis, Nancy Allen, Michael Lerner, and Wallace Shawn, the cast includes the likes of June Lockhart, the eternally ancient Charles Lane, and Kenneth Tobey, who back in the '50s fought back such menaces as The Thing from Another World and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Strange Invaders was a collaboration by an unlikely group of people, starting with Laughlin, who in the late '60s and early '70s was a producer on such films as The Whisperers, Joanna, Two-Lane Blacktop, Dusty and Sweets McGee, and The Christian Licorice Store. It was co-written by Laughlin and Bill Condon, who would would later write and direct Gods and Monsters, Kinsey, and Dreamgirls. It was the second collaboration between the two of them and producer Walter Coblenz; the first was the 1981 horror movie Strange Behavior, which was Condon's first screen credit. Strange Behavior, which had a similar mixture of elements and a semi-satiric approach to old genre movies, was a minor hit, and led the three to patch together plans for a "strange trilogy", but the projected third movie, The Adventures of Philip Strange, never got made because Strange Invaders was a box-office disappointment. Laughlin only directed one other movie, Mesmerized, a 1986 misfire starring Jodie Foster and John Lithgow, made in New Zealand and based on a screenplay by Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski; his last movie credit was as a writer on the long-in-the-unmaking Warren Beatty vehicle Town & Country (2001).