As Halloween draws near, Carl (Michael Dunn) and his friends decide to take Mr. Cranston’s (Vern Adix) offer to use his dilapidated mill property for a haunted house. In spite of all the local rumors about the old mill the kids begin decorating for the Halloween bash of their lives. However, unknown to them a rival group of kids has decided to scare Carl and his buddies out of the old mill. What neither group of teenagers realizes is that by going to the old mill they are trespassing on an extraterrestrial’s cover. This alien being has come to earth as part of an advanced invasion force and will stop at nothing to preserve its cover.
TeenAlien (1978) is even more wholesome than it sounds. This is a film dedicated to family friendly entertainment that feels like a television Halloween special drawn out for almost ninety minutes. Carl and his pals are total squares while the bullies who try to thwart their spooky season ambitions aren’t even that much worse. Until the alien reveals itself, TeenAlien is a pretty low stakes yarn that’s more atmosphere than anything else even remotely scary.
But this doesn’t mean that TeenAlien isn’t a lot of fun. Yes, there is some value in the nostalgia that the film evokes, but the primary allure of a film like TeenAlien is the earnestness with which the filmmakers have made the film. TeenAlien is a very cheaply made picture that is full of ingenuity and clever collaborations between creators to make something out of very little. The production team behind TeenAlien isn’t that different from Carl and friends in that their commitment to their projects is such that they’ll stop at nothing to make it the best that it can be.
The authors of TeenAlien, Sherma and Ed Yeates, have penned some of the most wooden dialogue this side of Ed Wood. Peter Semelka’s direction of the actors is such that the shortcomings of the dialogue are never disguised. Some performances are better than others, but as a whole TeenAlien is unintentionally flat and dramatically weightless. Yet, there are some interesting ideas mined from popular science fiction at the time. The notion of a covert alien invasion as well as the manner in which that invasion would occur is lifted from Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers.
Realizing the potential of the Yeates’ script, director Peter Semelka manages to create some images that possess a unique, frantically affecting quality that helps to elevate TeenAlien. One of these moments is the scene where the alien emerges from its transformation chamber as a human female (Judy Richards) and the other is the shot of Carl and his little brother running from the old mill in terror. Semelka also manages to stage the arrival of all the other undercover alien invaders to chilling effect. Semelka’s inexperience with directing actors for film is arguably balanced by his aptitude for creating genre specific images of a provocative nature.
There are so many truly bad horror and science fiction films, mainstream and otherwise, that a movie like TeenAlien is a reminder of how much can be accomplished with very little. TeenAlien is not a bad film, it’s just the film that circumstances would permit. In this context there is plenty to admire about this low budget independent picture.
