ALL SCI-FI

[ralfy]

From the YT description:

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

IMDB has several interesting trivia items for this production.
________________________________

~ The sequence with the man on the motorcycle was added to the movie after principal shooting had wrapped in order to pad out the running time to a reasonable feature length.

Note from me: Yes indeed, nothing fleshes a out good plot like a nice long motorcycle scene!

~ The sheriff's office was actually a set built in the basement of Don Dohler's house.

Note from me: I'll his kids loved it! They could go down the basement and play Cops & Robbers in real style!

~ Directorial debut of Don Dohler.

Note from me: Well, gee . . . a guy's gotta start somewhere.

~ This film was the third featured movie in the 2009 live show tour of "Cinematic Titanic", featuring "riffing" by alumni of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988).

Note from me: I'm sure Mr. Dohler felt truely honored!

~ The astronomer and the town mayor incorrectly use the words "meteor" and "meteorite" interchangeably as if they meant the same thing. In fact, the object is a meteor until it hits the ground at which time it becomes a meteorite.

Note from me: Well, we've all seen worse errors than that. At least they didn't call it an asteroid one minute and a comet the next. Hopefully they never said something really stupid like, "This meteor is obviously from another galazy!"

Unfortunately the YouTube link which Ralfy posted no longer works.

However, enjoy this fairly good version from YouTube of both the trailer and the full movie! The movie has closed captions in Spanish.


_______________ The Alien Factor Trailer 1977


__________


__________________ The Alien Factor (1978)


__________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Pow]

Robert Dennis wrote a script for the second season of "The Outer Limits" (1963~1965) which was untitled that involved alien animals.

A little boy lives in the rural Midwest. He is an outcast who is ignored and lonely.

One night, he sees a shooting star crash into a nearby field.

He discovers the remains of an alien probe sent to earth on a trial basis with a cargo of various samples of animal life native to the other planet.

The boy saves the bizarre-looking creatures, harboring & nourishing them.

The animals reciprocate his affection and become his pets.

The local hicks get wind of the boy's alien zoo and vent their paranoia by killing all the creatures.

A school teacher tries to comfort the boy by telling him "At least this means we're not alone." Yep, and she could add on to that any alien civilization should avoid those savage earthlings and planet earth at all costs. We're the type of planet that alien space crafts roll up their windows and lock their doors whenever they pass by us.

The story was vetoed due to the farmers destroying the animals.

Good golly Miss Molly, if they had ever gone ahead with this and filmed the episode, I'd been a balling!

While the story sounds intriguing, given TOL's budget and the special & visual FX capabilities of the 60s, the show would not have been able to realize a variety of exotic-looking alien animals very well.

Nowadays with CGI, audio-animatronics — and a healthy budget — a TV show could easily make this happen.

I'd love to see this as a TV series or film, but with one proviso: the alien creatures aren't slaughtered.

I would conclude the story with those humans who would defend the creatures against those who want to extinguish the aliens. We have both types of people in reality.

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

Wow, your right! That is a great idea for a story — but the slaughtered animals idea was terrible, as you said.

In 1977 (a year before The Alien Factor was released) I wrote a script for an amateur film project called Star Zoo, in which a large alien spacecraft filled with animal specimens from different planets crash lands in the south Georgia woods.

The ship is fully automated, and the A.I. computer who controls it wants the specimens that can breath Earth's air to survive while its complex life support systems are repaired by maintenance robots. So, the computer opens a large hatch and releases the specimens so they won't die inside the ship.

Thousands of alien creatures are allowed to escape. Some of the animals are dinosaur sized. I drew these two sketches as examples of the larger creatures.

Note that the first one is signed BC and dated '77. I call it a Centaursaurus.




_________


After crash landing, the ship generates a dome-shaped force field around the area, several miles in diameter, to keep the animals inside until it can telepathically "call" them back.

But two couples on a camping trip have been trapped inside the dome, and the wooded area soon becomes shrouded in fog because of a greenhouse effect caused by the dome, and a build-up of humidity.

The two couples become separated, and one couple finds the crash-landed ship. They go inside and eventually befriend the computer — who learned English and other languages before it even crashed, by analyzing gigabytes of info from transmissions it picked up during its approach!

Meanwhile, the other couple is lost in the strange, foggy wooded area, and they encounter dangerous creatures of all sizes. It's sort of like Skull Island, except that all the animals are aliens!
________________________________

The group of hopeful filmmakers for whom I wrote the screenplay had ambitious plans for their amateur movie. However, it was too much for such young and inexperienced people, so it never got made.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

In tune with some of the posts: DANGER: HUMANS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPqk-O-fD4

David.

[Pow]

Now that's a compelling story, Bud, it'd make a terrific film nowadays too.

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

Thanks!

I haven't thought of Star Zoo in decades . . . in fact, I seem to remember that the name was changed to Keeper of Beast by the time I finished the script.

Your description of the unmade Outer Limits episode reminded me of it.

Some of the nice imagery that I came up with for the concept included a climatic scene of the fully repaired ship resting on a wide, plain of grass in the remote wooded area as all the animals are returning to it because of the telepathic command the ship's computer sent out.

That's how it collects specimens on alien planets.

The scene would deliberately have a Noah's Ark look to it, with the animals filing into the ship in an orderly manner.

I was pretty naive to think such a story could be made as an amateur movie, but I just got carried away with the concept.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)