UFO: Target Earth
Tags: psychedelic

Plot synopsis:
Reporter Tom Lewis (Tom Harper) interviews a Georgian university professor, Professor Bauer (Ed Lynch), who saw a UFO last night. He saw a thunder of light and a fast-moving object. Mrs Acree (Ida Acree) also watched a huge light in the sky, but it couldn't be a helicopter because of the lack of noise. A couple of farmers (Luann McMann & George Lafia) also felt that the UFO was the one responsible for having taken them. The aliens didn't use words in English, they just felt the feelings of traquility and trust within themselves. A couple of ranchers (Johnny Baker & Sam Durrance) saw a cigar-shaped which desintegrated, but only the remains of a human airplane are visible at that moment. The ranchers insists to the interviewer that they know what they saw.A love song and title credits.On the afternoon of 26th March 1974, a university communications specialist, Alan Grimes (Nick Plakias) heard a military call. Somebody is checking strange phenomena, and that person thinks it's about UFO's. Gen. David Gallagher (Brooks Clift) is the leader of the Army.A small boy called Alan (Billy Crane) tells his mother (Martha Corrigan) that he's scared of a light which hurts and which got him naked. The mother dismismisses it saying that it was his waking star, and that nothing is the matter. Outside, the storm is about to break lose.Grimes wants to get in touch with Vivian (Cynthia Cline). She thinks that aliens are surrounding us, and that she can communicate with "it". Grimes makes an appointment with her for the following day. Grimes also talks to Dr Whitham (Phil Erickson), and the receptionist (Kathleen Long) tells him that he's in the planetarium. Whitham thinks that so-called UFOs are visual illusions. He shows Grimes around his office and they talk about the speed of light limit. Whitham thinks it's all a myth, and that the approaching comet will be confused as a UFO by some members of the public.Grimes and Vivian meet at a bar because she's feeling an oppresive feeling. She suffers a panic attack. The music in the bar fades away for a few moments.Grimes tells Dr. Mansfield (LaVerne Light) his suspicions, stating that he feels some kind of weird enerty, even within the room they are in. Grimes wants him, Vivian and Col. Gallagher to meet. He tells Grimes to code his messages, even in case of emergency. They talk about a lake in spiral, and she remembers some de-colourings in the electrical power poles. But Vivian has no sensations about the lake.Dr Mansfield lets Grimes use her computer. Vivian and Grimes talk to the woman (Martha Corrigan) who had a third-phase contact. Her declaration seems to be the same that some of Vivian's images. Vivian has a feeling of deja-vu when her and Grimes arrive to the lake. She feels a bit used, but takes his walkie-talkie anyway. He goes around in a boat in a lake.Vivian gets some sounds on the walkie -she's stayed near the tent- while Grimes is setting a light and camera system on the other side of the lake. Vivian runs away across the forest but leaves the walie behind. Grimes tries to talk to her with no avail. Grimes goes to the rescue and somebody answers him with Vivian's walkie. Mansfield and her assistant Dan Rivers (Tom Arcuragi) look for Vivian, and she thinks he should have not brought her there.Vivian keeps on hearing "stach, stach", and she tells them to go away, as though she were a different person. Vivian says they're using her. Mansfield takes her away. Back to the camp, Mansfield thinks that Vivian's got psychiatric problems. Mansfield thinks that the aliens may have fallen to Earth but they couldn't secure enough power to start their journey back to their planet. Mansfield herself won't believe that possibility until she sees them, but she needs to make some kind of explanation; she thinks that Grimes is too emotional. She looks at the comet.That night, Mansfield gets sick. The equipment points to a high concentration of energy underwater. Vivian cares for Mansfield when she starts to hyper-ventilate. The equipment detects great levels of energy and the TV set gets turned on. Grimes stares at the monitor feeling that somebody is with them. Rivers asks Vivian to tend to him. She doesn't want to leave Mansfield on her own and thinks that it was Grimes who produced the phenomena all the time.The aliens are shapeless pure energy, but humans are transmitting their fears to them, so humans should leave their fears aside. Mansfield wakes up and tells Grimes to cast his fears aside. The image on TV tells Grimes that they've been waiting thousands of years. The power of humans' mind and imagination is the power that the aliens need to activate their spaceship.Grimes will die or the planet will perish. Grimes is only the 4th person who ascended to the aliens' level. An elderly Grimes commits suicide in the lake, in spite of Rivers' attempt to stop him: Rivers can only rescue... a skeleton.The aliens say (I don't know to whom) that they are beyond the judgement of humans.More graphic design loops with orchestra's music. The loops become an alien spaceship which is going away from our planet.A quotation from Apocalypse.The eye of Grimes reflects an eclipse.---written by KrystelClaire

Review: I kind of enjoyed the leisurely pace of the movie; it was sort of a nostalgic flashback to a time when movies moved slowly enough for me to absorb all elements in a scene, instead of flashing through at such a breakneck speed that much information is lost.
It was a dopey movie with mostly inept acting and a dopey premise (the aliens' speeches at the end sounded like any given night on George Noory), but it wasn't totally a waste of time.
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.
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.
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.
Had the dialogue been any good or even slightly stimulating, then perhaps this would have been OK; but this dull script felt as though it had been written in haste or just ad-libbed by the actors in order to get it released quickly to take advantage of the UFO craze of the seventies.By the time of the "climactic" final scene, the audience expected to maybe finally have a glimpse of some spectacular space craft relic or alien body part, but instead all that was presented was one character shouting "for god's sake" numerous times at another who decides to follow some "imaginative call" to go into a lake believed to be a UFO crash site.
The ultimate fates of these two characters are not discussed here so as to avoid "spoiling" this for anyone desperate enough to sit through the whole thing; but suffice it to say, those still awake in the audience by this point yet again were not treated to anything interesting.For a very good reason, this is a film probably never to be found on video..
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.
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.
The directing is a bit poor, with sluggish pacing, pointless scenes of people philosophically discussing the nature of electricity and life on other planets, and special effects that come across like a fan-film homage to 2001.It's not a good movie.
As each scene was set up, I found myself wondering, "WTF?" There was some puzzling, obvious problem with the scene (like the boom mic being in the shot), the scene made no sense, or bad music was blaring, making the dialogue too difficult to hear.
In order to enjoy it, I think you need to be the kind of person who watches a movie because he wants to see just how incomprehensible and incompetent it can get.
BOG is a better movie that UFO: TARGET EARTH.
ZONTAR: THING FROM VENUS is a better movie than UFO: TARGET EARTH.I very fondly remember the UFO craze that gripped Amercia around the time of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, and while a bit early (1974) this film is surely a part of that craze.
There were a bunch of faux documentary films on UFOs & other worldly phenomenon at about the same time -- my favorite will always be IN SEARCH OF NOAH'S ARK -- and I was kind of hoping this would be one of them.
It isn't, and the last 20 minutes of TV blending feedback color head trip space junk might be great free-form visual expression, but please.I wish I could be kinder on this film: The only UFOs you see are still photos used for the opening credits, which I come back to again as the high point of the film.
I also dig the cheapo 70s interiors, editing room (literally) production design, and the idea of trying to make a movie about UFOs that essentially consists of people sitting around talking about them, followed by endless sequences of pre CAD or Apple Mac computer renderings instead of showing us space aliens.
Kind of like the end of 2001 (complete with an ambiguous close-up of a star person's eye) but without all the fuss & bother involved with getting us there.Something tells me also that the three 8/10 votes dragging this movie's user ratings curve up to 4/10 are in on the plot to deprive target audience viewers of a film with a name like UFO: TARGET EARTH of 83 minutes of their life that could be spent doing constructive things like playing golf, masturbating, or strangling small animals.3/10; I did just raise it a point after reconsidering the movie.
I have always been very interested in the UFO phenomenon and i couldn't wait to see this movie when it came out in 1974, so my ex-wife and i went to see it at a drive-in movie, and at first i thought it was going to be OK, but as it dragged on, it got worse instead of better, the whole movie made no sense at all to me.This movie was so bad i looked around and everyone else left, and we were the only ones left, i finally couldn't take it anymore and we also left, i can only hope this disaster of a movie never comes out on DVD or video, only someone who had never saw this sorry excuse for a movie would rent it or buy it!!!!
Thank goodness much better UFO movies came out later such as ''Close Encounters of the third kind'' and '' The interrupted journey'' and ''Fire in the Sky''.
The electronics expert hopes to recruit a group of scientists to aid him in investigating the signals, hoping to discover the secrets contained within the alien ship," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.Young teaching fellow Nick Plakias (as Alan Grimes) has a startling change-of-life UFO experience.
"UFO Target Earth" plays like a stretched-out "Outer Limits" episode, with one-tenth of the old show's budget.
Well, if you like that smooth musical sound of the 60s and 70s the title song is really pretty good.
i took a chance on this one not knowing what to expect.its probably the worst movie about UFOs ever made.its boring mumbo jumbo about an electronics expert investigating a UFO sighting.even agent Mulder from the x-files would avoid this one.its even worse then invasion from inner earth.low budget and it shows./imagine all the people that seen this at the movie theater.i got this one as part of the 50 movie collection;nightmare worlds,which should have a warning label that says;contains stinkers.well thats the chance you take with those DVD sets.if you have trouble sleeping,put this in your DVD player.it'll cure your insomnia.well one good thing about this movie its less then 80 minutes long.but thats 80 minutes that you'll never get back.incidentally there was a 50's movie called target earth and that one was actually pretty good.UFO target earth is painfull.1 out of 10..
UFO: Target Earth (1974) BOMB (out of 4) Incredibly stupid and silly sci-fi flick about a dorky young man who starts to investigate UFO's and then hears strange noises coming from a local lake where it was reported decades earlier that a spaceship crashed.
The film opens with various locals talking about their encounters with UFOs but even these stories are boring and what follows just gets even worse.
The acting is off the map bad as is the direction and I swear my 3-year-old cousin could have came up with better dialogue.
The one interesting thing is that the ending somewhat resembles Close Encounters of the Third Kind and knowing Spielberg loves these types of films I'm rather curious if he had seen this or been influenced by it..
Terrible film, suffered from not just being long, and boring, but it appeared it was some kind of 16mm film, made by college students on a shoestring budget and transferred to 35mm-not an uncommon practice at the time for low-budget films, turned into potboilers for drive-in 2nd features.
The plot is basically an electronics expert determines that strange signals may be coming from a rural area where he grew up-and a possible UFO crash site- at the bottom of a lake.
The whole thing reeks of poor film-making-everyone in one shot, talking-lots of glib talking- as if they are reading the script, and extremely poor FX(what there are of them).
Interesting opening titles sequence with a strange but catchy electro-smooth "70's sounding" song called "Between The Attic and The Sky" and a montage of UFO photos we have all seen before.
I'm pleased to say that, as something of a connoisseur of bad films, this one goes straight into my top ten worst I've ever seen.
Later,the same character blows a line but the take was kept.-Boom mics, camera tracks, out of sync audio, strange zooms and pans, jarring edits, time-shifts, .-A horrible prequel to the orgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally".-Characters standing half obscured by trees.-Constant rumbling crackle and pop in the soundtrack which I assume must have been real aliens desperately trying to stop the production for the sake of mankind.-Bad '70s music of every stripe, creepy electronic music for no reason whatsoever and I swear during the final scene, music stolen from much better films.-A General having a serious conversation while seated at his desk, twiddling a letter opener.
The idea for the film isn't the worst I've ever seen, but this is one of the two or three most inept attempts at movie-making I've seen.
If you like bad film, or just want to see what happens when a filmmaker leaves out every element necessary for a watchable movie, you should see this.
Though this had a decent beginning with truly intriguing metaphysical ideas; a dated but fine psychedelic soundtrack; an interesting pseudo-documentary technique; complete with the requisite narration, to start things off with; decent surroundings and I liked the charm and 'Ivory Girl' beauty of the medium (played by Cynthia Cline--this seems to be her only film credit), this low-budget creeper has no momentum, and no idea in either how to build those ideas into something worthwhile, or where to go with them.
The fractal graphics that are supposed to overwhelm us as no-cost special effects are horribly dated and left on-screen for way too long.I haven't seen director DeGaetano's other, later two films, but I hope they're not the snoozefests that this was.
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..
Unknown to a town's residents, a strange alien spacecraft lies under the murky depths of a local lake.
An electronics expert begins to investigate mysterious transmissions and the source of these signals which seem to point to under the lake.
This movie is on the same level with its low budget production featuring similar dialogue and photography.
I remember reading in TV guide years ago in a review for this movie,which did once play on the Cbs late movie before being forever relegated to the local channels fright night slot, that this film cost a microscopic $40000 to make and played in the local drive ins {probably at the bottom of a triple feature}and made $1000000 in return.Nowadays movies like this come in 50 movies on 13 DVD box sets.This could help people have retro drive in movie nights.
I can remember watching this film for the first time.
When she saw it, she said the film blew her mind away.To sum up UFO: Target Earth the best, it was a cerebral '70's science fiction film.Like George Romero, Dan O'Bannon, and John Carpenter did for independent films concerning the science fiction/horror genre(i.e. the original Night Of The Living Dead, Dark Star, and Halloween), Michael DeGaetano does the same thing with the subject about UFOs.The plot follows a university communications researcher/electronics expert, Alan Grimes on his quest to find a UFO that apparently crashed into a remote, back country lake near a power plant many years past.
The young man stares out of the window for a long time then phones someone else to make an appointment.Meeting with the local college's resident astronomer, Alan inquires about the logical possibility of flying saucers, an idea the professor quickly shoots down as anything but scientific.
While searching for evidence of aliens, he picks up signals that he believes are being emitted from the alien spacecraft--and they are coming from under the depths of the lake near the small town.
As a result, Alan grows old as he is exposed to the alien presence as the UFO takes off into a brilliant starfield.A real oddity this one - made for peanuts (reputedly $70,000), it's an ambitious attempt to translate the mid-70s passion for ufology to the big screen that writer/director Michael DeGaetano had the resources, imagination, or ability to carry off his lofty ambitions.
Three years later, Steven Spielberg would come along and show him how it should be done with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
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...
I think this movie attempted to be sort of cerebral sci fi, but only ends up being dull.
Offering a wonderfully wretched and hence oddly winning combination of sincere, yet terrible acting from a game, yet lame no-name cast, dippy dialogue, an alternately funky or moody wonky score, plodding pace, fumbling (mis)direction, a nonsensical script, chintzy (less than) special effects, sporadic instances of the boom microphone dropping into the frame, a heavy-handed theme about believers versus nonbelievers, an insanely groovy theme song called "Between the Attic and the Moon," clumsy mock interviews with ordinary folks who claim to have seen UFOs, a meandering and borderline incomprehensible muddled narrative, grainy cinematography, and, best of all, a gloriously trippy and ridiculous "what the hell?" psychedelic light show conclusion that attempts to recreate the mind-blowing climax of "2001" on a $1.50 dimestore budget, this singularly inept tale of a dedicated field researcher (an endearingly wooden performance by Nick Plakias) who discovers that he's some kind of chosen one whose key purpose in life is to help a bunch of aliens trapped in a lake get back to their home planet through the power of his imagination (!) is often so incredibly cheesy and absurd that all you hardcore aficionados of choice crummy cinema will be in hog heaven while watching it.
for those interested in UFO movies.
You cannot tell me that Spielberg and those guys didn't watch this film before they did the big extravaganza, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, three years later.
It also contains a closing scene that is a pathetic attempt to emulate Kubrick's masterful SF film -- I know, I know.
and I've seen everything Phil Tucker and Ed Wood directed.UFO Target Earth is, quite simply, the single most boring movie I've ever seen.
Don't waste your time with UFO Target Earth ...
A contender for worst sci-fi film of all time.
One of the sorriest excuses I've ever seen for a movie, UFO: TARGET EARTH is the pits.
Some of it's quite funny, actually, in a completely nonsensical way, but that's no recommendation to watch the film.When I read film reviews I often see people stating "this is an hour and a half of your life that you'll never get back".
I like Dean Stockwell, but this guy is just a boring nerd.So, what of the aliens or the UFO of the title?
Said pretty patterns play out until the end of the film, sometimes on screen for minutes on end without any type of dialogue.
***SPOILERS**** Laughable film about UFO's that starts off like a documentary on the subject with realistic TV interviews of people who saw UFO's and ends with a cheap l"2001" like light show of mostly figure eights as it descends into total chaos.
It's much later when by now a totally confused Alan gets in touch with local psychic to the stars Vivian that she taps into, by going into a trance, with the UFO entities brain waves that have been trapped at the bottom of a local lake since before the year 1,000 A.D.****SPOILERS*** It's then that a spaced out and out of touch with the real world Vivian tells Alan-Through her alien contacts-that it's him that been chosen!