UFO: Target Earth

1974 "UFO's...The Truth About Them Might Just Blow Your Mind for the Last Time"
2.7| 1h20m| G| en| More Info
Released: 01 September 1974 Released
Producted By: Jed Productions
Country:
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

An electronics expert searching for evidence of aliens picks up signals that he believes are from an alien spacecraft--and they are coming from a lake near town.

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Cast

Director

Alessandro De Gaetano, Michael A. DeGaetano

Production Companies

Jed Productions

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UFO: Target Earth Audience Reviews

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.
SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.
Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.
arfdawg-1 An electronics expert searching for evidence of aliens picks up signals that he believes are from an alien spacecraft.And they are coming from a lake near town.You will never care.This movie is directed like a TV film and is completely unwatchable.There's even a professor with the worst silver wig you'll ever see.The only saving grace is the 1hr 16 min short running time.The story is horrible, writing worse.Acting non existent.How financing for it was ever obtained is beyond me.
Scaarge To say this movie is terrible is not only an insult to the word "terrible," it's also not quite accurate. I mean, don't get me wrong, it is terrible, but it's terrible in its own unique way. You've never seen terrible quite like this, and if you're lucky, you never well.The characters are colorless, the story (if I may be so bold) slow-moving, the cinematography is murky and the camera work inexplicable. Just as an example, there are extreme close-ups and sudden shock zooms when nothing is happening on screen. The acting is competent, though it's hard to tell, given the script. The lead guy, who sounds like Kyle McLaughlin, reads his lines without any trouble. The others are just kind of there, except for the woman who plays the professor. She really bites the cake with her awful flat acting, easily outdistancing everyone else in smashing any interest into a thin, watery paste.What really stands out, though, is the dialog. Not since Edward D. Wood, Jr, has such utter blather been essayed about with such abandon. In fairness to Mr. Wood, at least his dialog had some relevance to the story. Here, there are endless, pointless discussions about everything under the sun, only occasionally straying into relevant territory. "Would you like a donut?" "Can anyone really ever 'have' a donut? Don't we actually just take one more moment from a happy childhood and cloak it in our concept of 'donut'?" That's not actual dialog from the film, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deleted scene out there....The whole film strikes me as a movie made by someone who had never actually seen a movie, but had heard them mentioned casually by other people from time to time. One day, this person comes across a camera abandoned in the woods. Rather than tell a story, he just films his friends saying things. He invites them on a camping holiday and films them saying some more things. He gets a couple of them jump into the lake, because he'd heard people did those sorts of things in movies.Really, the level of ineptitude on display is astonishing--unbelievable, almost. You would have to work hard to reach these heights (or depths) and I don't think anyone connected to this worked that hard. Thus, the incredible ending strikes me not so much as an obvious rip-off of "2001" but rather an attempt to remake that ending after only being told an incomplete, rambling description by someone who'd seen it while drunk.
Mark Honhorst So I was in the mood for a cheesy sci fi movie last night...and I got more than I bargained for. I found this movie on a 50 pack I'd had for awhile and popped it into the ol' DVD player. I remembered I'd tried to watch it before and gave up, but I decided to try again. I noticed the lavish opening credits sequence, with its fancy colors and real music. If I made this film, I would've just used white block letters and stock music to save time. It's obvious the filmmaker wasted his money on the expensive credits sequence, rather than saving it for good actors, non-blurry film, better editing...I think you get the point. The writer has written a fairly intelligent and thought provoking script, but a good script doesn't amount to a hill of beans in a movie with bad lighting, direction, editing... again, I think you get the point. I think this movie attempted to be sort of cerebral sci fi, but only ends up being dull. It would have made a much better book than movie. And boy, the movie looks terrible. At one point, a boom mike enters the shot. And stays there. And stays there. For a minute at least! And the ending! It looked nice considering what movie it was, but one gets the feeling that it was more than "inspired" by "2001: A Space Odyssey". Overall, I think this could've been much better. With a less cheesy title, better acting, etc, etc. Good for non bias sci fi geeks, but to everyone else, it's probably like sitting through a boring Physics class.
junk-monkey This is an incredible movie. It's not got everything! No plot, no tension, no character (let alone character development) - what it HAS got is a virtuoso display of incredibly bad direction and a script that gives the word meaningless a new... er... meaning.I suspect the director must have once had the concept of the Line of Interest (or the Centre Line, Director's Line call it what you will*) explained to him at some time but either forgot it almost immediately or just didn't get it because the camera is plonked down any old place and they shot whatever came into the viewfinder. Several times we get to watch people have long telephone conversations, but only from one end so we get to watch them say things like: "Yes I know all that." without having any idea what they have just been told. There are boom mikes in shot, tracks clearly visible, the DP does a great line in camera flares over people's faces and the sound levels are all over the place whole swathes of "dialogue" obscured by lousy songs. Though to be fair the sound problems may just be the quality of the DVD copy I saw; there was a lot of extraneous noise on the soundtrack (the songs ARE pretty sh1tty though). The script is bizarre; I honestly had no idea what was going on for the entire length of the film.The film opens with 3 minutes of mocumentary footage of people relating UFO experiences to a TV reporter. Then the opening credits (which were illegible on the copy I watched). Open on a young man trying to make a phone call then a portentous Voice Over (a la Ed Wood) tells us this young man is about to overhear something that will change his life forever. He somehow accidentally overhears two military types authorising a scramble of jets to investigate a UFO. The young man stares out of the window for a long time then phones someone else to make an appointment with someone else who turns out to be a psychic UFO spotter (or something). He then goes to meet his professor who lectures him (and us) at great length about the possibility of Life in the Universe. He goes to see 'Dr Mansfield' (whoever she is, we aren't told) and they have a conversation that really started the 'What the hell are they talking about?' ball rolling. The last line of the scene is "When a circle is drawn - they meet." Work backwards from there. After that it was a downhill slide into utter incomprehensibility. Ending in a low rent 2001: A Space Odyssey rip-off and the final bars of Khachaturian's Spartacus playing as the alien's space ship, trapped under a lake for a thousand years, zooms off to the stars powered only by Alan's imagination. Yep, you read that right, a bunch of aliens sat at the bottom of a lake for a thousand years waiting for a bad actor with a bald wig on to come and power their spaceship with his imagination. Insane.Favourite shot: Vivian and Alan sit in the back of the van excitedly telling each other some incomprehensible facts that are supposed to make the audience sit up and pay attention. They stop and the camera slowly zooms out leaving two bad actors sitting there waiting for the director to shout 'cut'. Luckily a huge lens flare obliterates them for most of it so we don't have to see them suffer too much.Favourite lines (favourite as in they made more sense than most. Three whole lines before I went WTF? ) Prof: What do we know about electricity?Alan: We know it's an energy source.Prof: Like the imagination.This is sublime stuff. Thoroughly recommended as a true awful classic. Seven out of ten on the Awfulometer. * An imaginary line drawn between two or more actors (and / or objects). Keeping the camera on one side of that line for several angles on one scene will allow those shots to be edited together with ease. Cross the line during shooting and you start having real problems as the on screen relationship between characters changes. Edit between the two and you get characters swapping places with each other and jumping from left to right of each other etc. Trust me, it's an easy concept to grasp, I'm just not explaining it very well.