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.)
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