![]() I'd also be remiss not to mention that both of these films feature a melodic, burbling synthesizer score ( The Alien Factor by Kenneth Walker Fiend by Paul Woznicki), so well done and so evocative of the time as to give me a super-warm fuzzy. The trajectory is quite unpredictable, as our zombie pal takes over an empty house, opens a music school (!), and generally irritates his neighbors (whose somewhat banal interactions also provide their own amusing little subplot, especially as the length of the wife's hair keeps changing from scene to scene.) And oh yes, there's Longfellow's murder/sustenance rituals, which also consist of shouting and stabbing at photographs of his victims (and a lot of black candles.)Īfter Alien Factor, Dohler must have learned a lot about shot framing, suspenseful editing, and economy of dialogue, such that Fiend is elevated from being merely a visually charming, colorful oddity like its predecessor, to being an aggressively weird and disquieting horror tale. In the film, a mysterious alien force, an ethereal red-glowing flying thing, for reasons unknown to us, reanimates (or possesses) a buried corpse, and the combo adds up to one nasty character, an intense sadist named Mr. If I seem to disparage The Alien Factor, it's only because Dohler's next feature goes straight to the heart of my aesthetic nerve centre.Įverything that The Alien Factor may lack in sophistication is more than made up for by director Don Dohler's next movie, Fiend (aka Deadly Neighbor, 1980), a genuinely creepy, witty and highly original living-dead scenario. Make no mistake, The Alien Factor is eyeball-pleasin' the title sequence alone should be canonized as some kind of holy representation of 70s goodness. These folks clearly worked hard on the monsters-one of which has anatomically built-in platform heels-and in general, your entertainment will come from the earnest and colorful visual effects and primitive, in-camera and stop-motion techniques. Loaded with awkward blocking and long snatches of blandly delivered expositional dialogue, its strength is in its simple charms: a few good ideas, some amusing characters, and enough money-shot visuals to inspire 100 great screen captures. The Alien Factor (1978) is so archetypal of 70s ultra-low-budget sci-fi/horror that it almost seems like a SCTV parody of the genre. ![]()
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