Weird Wednesdays: Extra Terrestrial Visitors

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

If there’s one thing all filmgoers can agree on, it’s the stone-cold fact that Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was missing the wholesale murder of several cast members. Note that nobody is necessarily saying that this would have improved the beloved classic, but it can’t be denied that it certainly isn’t in there. Director Juan Piquer Simón’s Extra Terrestrial Visitors certainly has that one element on Spielberg’s beloved tale, and that somehow isn’t even the weirdest part.

The 1980s were a golden age of ripoff cinema, some charming, some pathetic, and some utterly baffling. The Italian film scene had filmmakers like Bruno Mattei outright making purported sequels to Alien, Terminator, and many more before their own studios greenlit legitimate ones. As home video exploded, video stores were looking to stock their shelves in any way possible, and in an era where a home copy of E.T. was around $80 (over $250 in modern inflation), it was much easier to pick up something that looked close enough when every copy on the shelf was checked out. Some kids ended up with Mac and Me, some poor souls even ended up with Nukie (arguably the E.T.: The Video Game of cinema), and some ended up with Extra Terrestrial Visitors, which preceded those two by several years. In these Wild West days of video distribution, a movie this obscure and unloved could be found under several different names, such as The Unearthling, The Return of E.T., and its most infamous title, Pod People.

Distributed in the 1990s by a group called Film Ventures International, Pod People took on a life of its own when it was licensed to then up-and-coming comedy show Mystery Science Theater 3000 in its third season, leading to a classic episode where host Joel Hodgson and his robot pals mercilessly mocked this retitled disasterpiece, complete with new opening credits that inexplicably featured footage from a completely unrelated (and considerably more low-budget) Don Dohler film known as The Galaxy Invader. For years this murky transfer was all most American audiences knew of Simón’s film, complete with pre-internet memes built into the runtime (a hilarious moment punctuated by the words “it stinks!” became a running gag throughout MST3K’s history), but there was more to be uncovered.

While audiences grew to love laughing at this movie, few had less enthusiasm for the final product than the director of the movie itself. Juan Piquer Simón was following up his utterly baffling and absolutely fascinating slasher movie Pieces (“It’s exactly what you think it is!” proclaimed one of the poster’s two entirely unrelated taglines) with a basic story about an alien coming to earth and murdering people, no more, no less, and then Spielberg’s friendly alien took the box office by storm. Suddenly, the producers of this Spanish/French co-production had decided that what their horror movie needed was to also be a potentially touching tale of friendship between a child and an alien, totally derailing the tone and damning their own film to artistic failure but cultural memorability. In 2023, long after the Pod People version’s rise to infamy, the truly mad folks at Severin Films gave it a proper restoration and home media release, prompting a re-evaluation and allowing many of us to see it for what it truly is for the first time.

While the effort is commendable, the movie is still an awkward mess, a clear mishmash of tones that does manage to provide some amusement. It opens on a group of egg poachers as they see what they think is a meteor crash and investigate. One of the poachers enters a red-glowing cave, discovers a stash of large eggs (perhaps Alien was also an inspiration) and smashes them, clearly enraging the mother of these eggs and leading to his inevitable death at her hands, leaving one egg remaining. Elsewhere, a temperamental pop musician named Rick (Ian Serra) takes a couple passes at his new single (presumably called “Hear the Engines Roar” considering they repeat that line about 300 times) before calling it quits and packing up his backup singers (including his girlfriend, who he is openly cheating on), his producer, and Laura (Susana Bequer), some girl he just met to hit the road and go camping for the weekend. Simultaneously, a young boy named Tommy (Oscar Martin) who seems to live in the middle of the woods with his mother and an extremely unpleasant uncle, explores the cave with the egg. His main character trait is that he’s obsessed with all types of animals, and so he takes the egg home. It hatches, revealing what appears to be a man in a gorilla suit with an aardvark-like alien head. He names this alien Trumpy for his trumpet-like nose and proceeds to hide it from his family.

Meanwhile, the musicians are goofing off in the woods, antagonizing each other in various ways, until Laura runs into the mother alien, who sends her plummeting from a cliff, which leaves her with marks on her forehead that seem to form the Big Dipper. The plots eventually converge as the band comes upon Tommy’s family, taking refuge in their home as they try (and fail) to save Laura’s life. In private, Trumpy begins to telekinetically play with the toys in Tommy’s room, as well as denoting on a star map that he appears to originally hail from the Big Dipper. As the adults try to contact a ranger station, the alien mother continues to strike, leaving more victims with the forehead constellation pattern, a phenomenon that the movie is never interested in explaining. Tommy continues to hide his alien pal as the adults hunt his mother and keep getting picked off until the inevitable face-off, and unfortunately despite all the funny business, this is what ultimately harms Extra Terrestrial Visitors.

At the end of the day, you have an 84-minute long movie that feels overstuffed with characters aimlessly wandering the foggiest woods you’ve ever seen. There is some fun to be had here, and it deserves its slot as a Weird Wednesday pick, but in a heckle-proof theatrical environment the padding really works against elements like the comedic amount of product placement and how the characters just have a picture of Ronald Reagan in their homes so you know that they’re clearly American. You don’t have any truly likable characters, Trumpy looks ridiculous, and the potential it has to be a sweet kids movie is squandered as half the cast ends up incredibly dead. The ending is admittedly hilarious, but even that leaves the audience feeling hollow as the humor comes from the fact that some studio head truly thought that the relatively bleak ending could measure up to Spielberg’s masterpiece. Nothing is gained and plenty is lost as the credits roll, with any emotional weight completely squandered.

While this is undeniably a poor movie, it is indeed fun to watch, but not taken as a representation of Juan Piquer Simón’s finest work. The aforementioned Pieces, while similarly baffling, is one of the most raucous slashers of the age, filled with laugh-out-loud moments, gruesome kills, surprise martial arts, and truly one of the most insane endings ever filmed. His 1988 film Slugs is also noteworthy, if only for some truly gnarly creature effects. Simón clearly did his best work within the horror realm, so muting that element of his work makes Extra Terrestrial Visitors a victim of self-fulfilling prophecy, forever associated with the punchline of Rick making the “OK” sign in the air and proclaiming “it stinks!” This movie may stink, but these visitors are worth meeting once, if only for the laugh. And if you take that visit with some wise-cracking robots, nobody’s going to judge you this one time.

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