Invasion from Inner Earth (1974)

 

Director: Bill Rebane

Screenplay: Barbara J. Rebane

Cast: Paul Bentzen as Stan; Debbi Pick as Sarah; Nick Holt as Jake; Karl Wallace as Eric; Robert Arkens as Andy; Arnold Didrickson as Sam

Ephemeral Waves

 

People running in the streets, red smoke in the Wisconsin woodland, and pie plate UFOs belie what Invasion from Inner Earth actually is. About an alien illness decimating the Earth's population, and likely alien involvement too, the UFOs themselves are never explained or become directly involved. Instead, quite soon into the film, we enter the snowy woodlands into a conversation about growing up and getting married between an adult brother and sister living in isolation.

In-between a main theme re-appropriated for Lady Street Fighter (1981) and weird seventies trippy effects being seen occasionally, what the film actually is involves referencing film and genre film critic Kim Newman's observation, from Arrow Video's blu ray set Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection. In his appreciation of Bill Rebane, even Newman expressed reluctance with Invasion from Inner Earth as a "difficult" film to watch, where he suggests in comparison what happens when community theatre interconnected with these types of independent genre films made for drive-ins in this period. Invasion from the Inner Earth is a drama first, a lot of talking about the end of the world, where travelling inland, the brother and his male friends by a small plane are blissfully unaware of what has transpired with the world and an alien plague, beginning their own journey and the death of those close even when they travel back to isolation at home.

Beyond this, with the exception of an ominous glowing red light, their story including his sister is a lot of conversation which is not connected to a progression of events or fleshing the characters out. Barring a stint with a small personal airplane, most of the production is told in rooms with dialogue talking about the apocalyptic tale. As a result, and unlike a BBC Quatermass production from the fifties, which worked around budgetary limitations and had Nigel Kneale as a screenwriter of considerable talent, this is a sluggish film to watch, the comparison apt if against this theatrical film's disfavour. It is about its subject in how it is talked of, not of showing it, and yet the dialogue is closer to a film here you would get gratuitous UFO sightings even if the pie tins on string, rather than occasionally. It feels a chamber piece that is felt severely of its length, and it is damning to say that even next to the feature film Bill Rebane made before, the infamous Monster A-Go Go (1965) that Herschell Gordon Lewis put the unfinished footage together of, that film hailed as one of the worst ever made was far more easier to watch.

This has its quirks, mood boosters that show reward for truly patient. A strange gag about Channel 9's Post Terminus, because even in the post-apocalypse, where UFOs and alien diseases exist, local TV shows with a host in a Butlin's red jacket still exist, where testimonies on being picked up by aliens are recounted before the show gets frazzled off the air. There is a freak-out psychedelic moment where a plane explodes, and we see a radio DJ losing his mind in his recording booth, believing he is the last living person and speaking out into the perceived void on air. Also, the ending is weird, about the last two actual people, a man and a woman, being reborn as kids, which is not a spoiler as it really does not make sense at all in context.

Most of the film however will be unbearable for people. I see what the point is, a group in the isolated snow covered woods of Wisconsin experiencing the loneliness and paranoia when the world ends, but it feels like the aforementioned Quatermass concept without the shine and character building of those work. It is a concept instead made into the most lethargic possible of tones and with clear improvisation, one character entirely the MVP because Bill Rebane let him, as the likable joker and potential love interest to the sister character, ab-lib silly voices. My younger self would have not gotten through this film; now, I watched this as a pleasingly lacksidasical curiosity, but one I cannot recommend with significant caution over.