Invasion From Inner Earth

Cabin Fever

Invasion From Inner Earth
USA 1974 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

 Warning: Spoilers on this one. You probably won't want to watch it anyway

Okay, so the second film in the  Blu Ray box set from Arrow called Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection is Invasion From Inner Earth. It’s a small, microbudget film, made in Wisconsin and set in Canada (from what I can make out). Alien beings have taken over the Earth and, there’s not much made clear about them (although there is conjecture at one point from one of the more likeable characters that they are martians living inside the Earth just resurfacing, at one point). They manifest themselves very occasionally as a flying saucer, an echoey voice on a radio or, most often, as either a red gas or a red light. Anyway, most major cities have been wiped out by the aliens but this is news to a bunch of young pilots who have been staying at a log cabin in the wilderness for a few days. They fly back to their airfield, some miles away and, as they do, the opening credits finally kick in.

Okay... so I’ll say up front before I get to the rest of it that there is no music credit for this film and on the IMDB, Rebane is listed as music editor. Some of the music here is obviously library music. But the main title music... well, it could be library music I suppose. What it actually is, is a very bad cover version of Ennio Morricone’s opening title music for The Good, The Bad And The Ugly... sounding very much like somebody, perhaps Bill Rebane himself, is performing it on a very cheap Casio keyboard. There are maybe two notes changed in the melody but certainly not enough to distinguish it from the original theme in any way whatsoever and I find it hard to believe that there was never a law suit about this piece of music. I mean, you have to hear this to believe it... wow. It’s like somebody tried to make the famous music sound as bland as they possibly could... and succeeded admirably. Incidentally, the direction credit on this is simply, Directed by ITO. Ito was Bill Rebane’s name in Latvia before he came to the US and changed it to William.

Okay, so after this bonkers musical detour, the plane with the pilots land at the airfield but everybody else is dead by the time they hit the ground. They even see a plane crash when its engine cuts out. As they explore the airfield and the nearby lodge, two of the pilots encounter a red spotlight randomly probing walls etc. Anyway, they all get back on their plane and go to stay back at the log cabin from whence they come.

Pretty much 95% of the movie takes place in that cabin, as the five people (four men and one woman) speculate as to just what the heck is going on and why they can’t get anyone other than an obvious, alien voice on the radio. And that’s pretty much it for most of the film. You get the occasional taste of what’s happening in the outside world, including ‘the last radio DJ’ who seems to be broadcasting to nobody... but pretty much this carries on the trend in Rebane’s movies for any action happening off screen, for the most part. Even the airplane crash near the start is off camera... we just hear a noise as it crashes and then, a little later, two of the team come upon it in the form of... I don’t know... like an elabourate bonfire but certainly not looking like a plane crash.

This film also carries on with that little thing I noticed on Monster-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) where two or more of the characters have a certain underlying hostility in their interactions. It’s like the director prefers when some of his characters just don’t get on. I guess it makes for dramatic dialogue, perhaps. The most cranky of the five tries to escape in the plane when supplies run out but a red alien light explodes his vehicle mid air. Then one of them tries to escape in a handy snowmobile but, when he encounters a red gas, he suddenly vanishes from existence. A similar thing happens to one of the three remaining friends when they try and hike out a couple of days to the nearest town in the treacherous, snowy waste. At the end, one man and woman get to the nearest, deserted town and then... well... they disappear and are transformed into two, half naked children who are walking in green fields. And that’s the end and... nope, no clue. I guess maybe they are the new Adam and Eve or... yeah, I don’t really know what’s going on here to be honest. The lack of clarity, cheap production values and suspicions that not all the footage required was actually shot, contributes to an ending which is far from satisfactory or, really, in any way penetrable.

All that being said, though, I liked the movie, in a ‘spectator sport’ kind of way. It felt easy and comfortable. Nothing much happens and it’s genuinely too ridiculous to really cause either offence, outrage or pretty much any other feeling than, perhaps, the feeling of being slowly anaesthetised as the film drags on. It felt like an easy place to inhabit as an audience member and I certainly didn’t hate it so... yeah... that’s my takeaway from Invasion From Inner Earth. I can’t say I’d particularly recommend it to anyone ever but, like Douglas Adams’ description of Earth in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, I would say it’s... mostly harmless.