Director: Juan Piquer Simón
Writers: Joaquín Grau and Juan Piquer Simón
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 4 remain!)
A meteor carrying alien eggs crashes on Earth. Two aliens emerge—one befriends a young boy while the other starts killing everyone it meets.
So it’s Pod People. You ever see that episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? “It stinks!” That’s this movie. And for that reason it holds a special place in my heart.
Even though I’m on the border of being a Millennial (the start time keeps sliding backwards. I think the official definition now is, “Have you been fucked over by the Baby Boomers’?”), I do remember a time before the Internet. When I was growing up in Northern Indiana, I lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have access to cable. Even if we had had access, we wouldn’t have had access to Comedy Central, the then home of Mystery Science Theater 3000. All we had was over-the-air TV and Entertainment Weekly talking about all this brilliant television that we couldn’t see.
Then came the Mystery Science Theater Hour, a syndicated version of MST3k that broke each episode into two one-hour parts (hence the name). That show was picked up by one of our local networks, but it didn’t air until, I think, 3 AM on Saturday night. On top of that, the network only seemed to show four episodes (so two complete MST3k episodes) over and over. One was Cave Dwellers (“Miles and miles O’Keefe!”) and the other was Pod People. I still remember and constantly go back to the jokes “Little wing-ed potatoes” and “Trumpy! You can do stupid things!” In other words, my introduction to MST3k, a show that’s been pretty important to me in terms of introducing me to paracinema, horror hosts, camp culture, and copyright theory, began with a weird little kid raising a gross puppet that hatched from an egg. What can I say about it?
“It stinks!”
The movie opens with an explosion in space that drives a meteor to Earth. It crashes and is eventually found by one of a trio of poachers looking for rare birds eggs. Upon finding the stash of alien eggs, the egg poacher, curiously, just starts smashing all of them. An alien emerges and kills him. His partners are now left stranded in the woods with a bad storm coming in.
Meanwhile, a band is recording an album. The lead singer is a dick. They all leave to go camping for the weekend, but a groupie the singer had been schmoozing with earlier invites herself along. The singer can’t tell her no because she’s related to one of the label execs. Her coming, though, really pisses off the singer’s girlfriend.
While stopping to cook some food over a fire, the groupie gets offended and bullied to the point that she runs away. She finds the two poachers who threaten her, leading her to run and fall off a cliff. The alien comes by and marks her. Her friends find her, take her back to the RV, and start looking for help.
They arrive at a cabin where a family, the third part of the movie is living. It’s a man, his sister, and her son. The man used to work with the poachers and the son collects animals—including one of the alien eggs! The band arrives, takes shelter hoping the phone will start working the next day, and the groupie dies. Meanwhile, the kid’s egg has hatched and he starts raising the alien as his friend Trumpy.
Things proceed. Two people leave the house to try to call for help, end up at a ranger station where they find the corpse of one of the poachers, and get attacked by the alien themselves. Back at the house, the alien somehow arrives before the survivor of the ranger station attack and kills another of the people. The kid thinks Trumpy did it, then realizes there’s a second monster. Folks find Trumpy, kid prevents them from killing it, asshole singer sees both aliens together with the kid and realizes they’re not a threat. Uncle opens fire, killing the evil alien but getting killed in the process, and the singer takes the kid home, lying so Trumpy can live on. THE END.
The movie was supposed to be a generic alien invasion monster movie, but then ET happened so they had to rewrite the script to insert Trumpy and the lovable kid. It was a mistake. One of the most memorable riffs is, “Trumpy! You can do stupid things!” for a reason. I don’t know what the movie would have been if it was just the straight-up monster thriller, but shoehorning the ET angle in just kills any kind of tension and makes a lot of things strange. I already mentioned the alien somehow getting to the cabin on foot before the people at the ranger station can drive back, but there’s also the disappearance of the poachers. One is just found dead in the ranger station, but we don’t see him die. The other is just no longer in the film.
I don’t have much to say about the movie beyond its MST3k connection. That’s a classic episode and I recommend watching that. The uncut version of the movie though begs you to give it a pass no matter how catchy the song.
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