The highs and lows of famed horror director Tobe Hooper’s career are striking in their contrast. On the one hand, he directed popular classics like the Steven Spielberg production Poltergeist and the Stephen King-adapted mini-series Salem’s Lot, after making a name for himself with one of the greatest horror films of all time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of schlock, from the sleazy, swampy 1977 exploitation flick Eaten Alive early in his career, all the way up to late-career low-budget duds like Crocodile (2000) and Djinn (2013), films with zero cultural impact. Sandwiched in the middle of Hooper’s filmography, there’s even a movie about a demonic laundry-folding machine.
In 1986, the same year that saw a sequel to Hooper’s most famous film in which he presented a comedic reimagining of Leatherface and the deranged Sawyer clan, he also helmed a remake of a notable 1953 sci-fi B movie, Invaders from Mars. The original predated Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1957) in employing a similar concept—alien imposters in familiar bodies. In the case of Invaders from Mars, we get electrodes bored into brains rather than pod people.
Hooper leans heavily into recreating a ‘50s atmosphere and aesthetic, as 12-year-old David (Hunter Carson) is first seen gazing at a meteor shower in the backyard with his dad, George (Timothy Bottoms), in a nostalgic slice of idyllic Americana. Soon, the young boy spots a UFO landing just over the hill during a thunderstorm, and when he convinces his dad to investigate, George returns acting strangely cold and detached. More concerningly, he seems fixated on bringing his wife, Ellen (Laraine Newman), over to the other side of the hill as well.
Though David is saved from the same fate by the arrival of the school bus, the boy deduces that aliens have infiltrated the brains of teachers and students as well, spotting the telltale wounds on the back of their necks. When David’s finally able to convince the maternal, not-yet-controlled school nurse Linda (Karen Black, the child actor’s real-life mother) that something is amiss, the two take their suspicions all the way to the US military, who proceed to infiltrate the Martians’ labyrinthine space ship, burrowed beneath the sand.
When they finally appear, the Martians are a definite upgrade from the original film, as ridiculous as they are. Accurately described by one character as “huge, ugly, slimy, giant Mr. Potato Heads,” they’re oversized meatballs on spindly, stiff legs, equipped with enormous mouths and earth-melting laser weapons attached to their eyeballs. Their leader is a brain with as face—in anticipation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ supervillain Krang, who first appeared in the comics a year later—who emerges from and retreats into a hole on a glistening stalk. Unfortunately, these over-the-top creatures, more campy than frightening, are more or less the only highlight of an otherwise drab film.
Like the original, and even, for that matter, the original The War of the Worlds, which also premiered in 1953, there is simply far too much time spent on dull military strategy. Despite the imposter premise, loved ones seeming like strangers, carrying the most potential for dread, we just end up seeing David and Linda running from various alien-controlled people and then working with the military to figure out ways to do something about it. The stilted dialogue does nobody any favors either, but part of the problem is that Carson is a terrible actor here—and judging by subsequent acting credits that include getting replaced as Bud Bundy in the pilot of Married… With Children and nameless film roles like “Mary’s Brother” and “Man on Pier,” it didn’t get much better. The son of Black and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, the boy plays a far less convincing David than the one in the 1953 original, sapping much of the film’s tension as a result.
Catching Invaders from Mars on Pluto or Tubi in order to check out some wacky, practical-effect creature design is only modestly worth the effort. The deal is only slightly sweetened with the opportunity to spot some cinematic notables such as Nurse Ratched herself, Louise Fletcher, as an antagonist alien-controlled schoolteacher, James Karen (fresh off The Return of the Living Dead a year earlier) as a military general and Bud Cort as a young NASA scientist who gets vaporized by a Martian eyeball cannon. All in all, Hooper made much better films in his career, and unfortunately also much worse.
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