B-movies Revisited

I was at Wally World this past weekend getting some new tires installed on the Corolla so, of course, I had to rummage through the $5.00 DvD bin. I found one disk which contains two sci-fi films; War of the Worlds 2 and Invasion of the Pod People. I always choose to purchase these cheap flicks, for $5.00 ya can’t go wrong, right? My lovely assistant and I watched the Invasion of the Pod People last night and I wish I had my $2.50 back to send on a gallon of gasoline.

This movie had all the qualifications of a bad, bad movie; bad acting, bad dialogue, poor plot progression, terrible soundtrack quality, bad set selection, scenes of people talking on cell phones, scenes of people in cars, stock footage and really bad special effects. When I see films like this I think, this was someone’s film school project. The truth is it was probably an independent film festival project or made for Showtime.

To describe the acting as bad is using creative license on my part. There wasn’t much acting in the film but there was a good bit of reading of cue cards or Teleprompters. The people in the film look at the side of the camera in every scene. The soundtrack had a lot of unexplained noise in a few scenes. The noise, which I figured out was supposed to be the pods multiplying, was so loud that the dialogue was unintelligible.

The plot of the film would have been difficult to follow if I hadn’t read the description on the DVD cover. The characters of the movie supposedly worked for a modeling agency. The story the film presents is; There’s a company named Blockthorn that does something and one guy, the boss, wants something done and yells at his employees about getting it right. Then some of the employees become obsessed with a strange plant. One of the employees is attacked by a pod from the plant and then keeps sharing the plant with her coworkers.

The camera angle may be on a conversation but the dialogue might as well be, "Hey officer friendly will you help us with these plant people. Oh look, they are playing Frisbee in the park," as the actor speaking looks out of the shot rather than at the other actor. Yes, this movie was so bad that I wanted to turn away. But we suffered through to the end which left the plot open as if they intend to make a sequel.

Then there’s the sex. Of course these pods from outer space know about seduction and use it to acquire their pod victims. I was very surprised that the first scene in this film from Wally World was a sex scene. There where at least four sex scenes with topless ladies. Some one slipped this one past the censors at Wally World. But these scenes were bad too 'cause only in low budget films do folks have sex without taking their pants and skirts off.

Invasion of the Pod People is just bad. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone watch this film. I wouldn't even put this film on the B List, it is more of an F List product. The folks who made it are probably laughing all the way to the bank and I hope this film was the low point of their careers. I just wish, that once, I could get the money that is spent to produce films like this one. I’d use it to make a film with some lego figures with better results. Hum…? (having a light bulb moment)