I grew up on TV movies, to an extent. Specifically, I was nurtured on the foul stunting brew of the Sci-Fi Original Movies. I don't know if they still do these movies, but for those of you who haven't had a chance to see them: they were extremely cheap two-hour sci-fi action movies that typically ended up better than a lot of direct-to-video stuff of a similar type. The CGI was awful (though still not the worst I've seen) and the plots were flimsy as hell, focusing on getting both the computer-generated creatures and the celebrity or "celebrity" guest star (Lou Diamond Phillips, Bruce Boxleitner) out in front of the camera as soon as possible. No emphasis was put on horror aside from generically borrowing cinematic techniques from straight-to-video horror movies from a decade past. There was a sense of good fun about the whole thing, along with a sincerity in their dedication to producing modern day monster movies, which lasted until they decided their next marketing strategy involved assuming their audience were idiots, leading to such decrepit husks as the Sharknado series. I'd forgotten until recently what power TV movies have due to my disillusionment with Sci-Fi, but as with B-Westerns, it turns out that I was turning up my nose at a gold mine. I keep finding reports of TV movies that transcend the borderline-reactionary conservatism that apparently afflicts the TV movie industry, such as it is, and there was no better introduction to these examples of transcendence than Alien Lover.
Susan is a young woman whose parents have just died. She has spent the last several years in a mental hospital trying to recover from the trauma of this, and as the movie begins her uncle Mike and aunt Marian are preparing to take her into their home. Mike is hesitant as he's worried her mental health will once again slip, but Marian assures him he has nothing to worry about. Indeed, Susan seems very friendly, but as soon as she arrives she begins hearing a voice whispering her name. She becomes worried that she's hallucinating, but she finds a dusty old TV in her cousin Jude's workshop. Before long a figure appears on it, a handsome young man by the name of Marc. Marc explains to Susan that he is an alien who lives in the TV, and he wants to be her friend. At first, Susan believes this is Jude playing a prank on her--and admittedly, Jude is a little shit, which I'll get into later. Eventually Susan begins believing in Marc, and falls in love with him. But she tells her aunt and uncle about her meetings with him, and that's enough for Mike to want her recommitted. Not all is as it seems, though, as Jude warns Susan that he does know Marc: he was the source of the engineering brilliance that Jude to be a college freshman at 15, and the young prodigy believes he may be trying to break out of the TV to invade our world.
Alien Lover aired as an episode of The Wide World of Mystery, an anthology show dedicated to murder mysteries with occasional journeys into sci-fi and fantasy. They did another movie I want to see, The House and the Brain, which apparently features wizardry. Of all the episodes of Wide World, Alien Lover is the one people remember, and indeed as far as I know it's one of the few reasons the show is still on anyone's radar. Alien Lover went through sort of a Candle Cove phase where people remembered it as a big patch of traumatizing weirdness, almost too vague to be properly remembered but still full of nightmarish details. Now, I never saw this thing when it originally aired, so I don't have scars on my youth from it, but I can see how this could definitely scare kids. The idea of a monster living in one's TV--in a movie one is watching on a TV!--is pretty creepy to the adolescent mind. But Marc the alien is just the top layer of this movie's horror. This is a psychological thriller, pure and simple, and it focuses on nothing less than the topic of ableism.
Susan is trapped in a situation which a lot of mentally ill people will know. No one trusts her, because even though they don't know the circumstances of her illness, they automatically assume that she'll snap again, and violently, at that. It is the literal definition of prejudice--pre-judgment--that mentally ill folk face every time they "come out" to someone. That is one risk she faces. But there's also the possibility that Marc isn't real, and we only see him because of what she sees. Marc's reality is seemingly confirmed when Jude tells her that he's seen her too, but she raises the possibility that Jude is just gaslighting her--admittedly, the refusal to actually stick with this mystery is one of the film's weaknesses, as a scene taking place after Susan leaves shows that Jude is being honest.
But this movie is a genuine nightmare as far as its character dynamics. As I've said before and as I'll get to in a minute, Jude is a colossal asshole. However, there is a reason for this. In addition to having medieval notions of mental illness, Marian and Mike have their own unique personalities that make them really despicable. Marian is nice, yes, but she's too nice. She's nice in that White Grandma way, where she ends every observation with, "Don't you agree, so-and-so?", and you should agree, for after all, her belief is that it is friendlier to agree. And this sort of philosophy also informs one of the opinions that Mike posits: "Sometimes being kind is more important than being honest." Mike seems to believe this maxim, but he rarely acts on it, as he is basically never kind and basically always dishonest. Jude's bitterness towards Susan is contextualized in a dinner scene where we see that it is not only his precocious intelligence that's made him an arrogant little carp's cock, but also his rage at having passive-aggressive, lying, hypocritical parents. That detail, along with his eventual fate, redeem him somewhat.
I say "somewhat" because in a lot of ways, Jude treats Susan worse than his parents do. As soon as he shows up he starts calling her crazy, eventually reaching the point where he says, "What, do you think you deserve special treatment because you freaked out?" Um...in a way...SHE DOES, ASSHOLE. Generally, accommodating people who have had nervous breakdowns bad enough to require hospitalization is a good idea because it's kind, and it's kind because it prevents them from having a relapse. Now, that sounds like I'm taking the same side as Mike and Marian, but unlike them, I'm not treating Susan's relapse as anything but a bad thing for her. At no point does any other character consider what she must be emotionally going through. Yes, accommodations shouldn't allow people to abuse their loved ones, nor should mental illness ever be considered an excuse for abuse, but Susan only becomes potentially threatening to others after they threaten her. I mean, her parents fucking died. She's probably in a deep depression as a result of her experience--it's not rational to assume that her grief could have led her to want to hurt other people. And really, to return to Jude's statement, it's not even "special treatment" to treat people the way they ask to be treated, given that that's typically a good guideline for socializing with people who aren't mentally ill as well. Seriously, just be compassionate to people! And in sum, Jude...fuck you!!
Sorry. I...guess I got a little into that.
Alien Lover has a lot of flaws, even besides Jude. There are laughable scripting moments, like people being weirdly calm about the prospect of their houses being bugged with cameras by strangers. The opening of the movie features of the clunkiest exposition I've heard in a while, and the acting is definitely TV acting, and '70s TV acting at that. And I went in expecting something much more gruesome than I ended up getting, based on how disturbing people made this sound. But all the same, Alien Lover provoked some sort of reaction in me, evidently enough. That makes it a recommendation in my book. Hopefully sometime soon we'll get to return to the kingdom of television cinema to see what other awesome shit was made in the confining framework of the TV industry.
If you like the site and want to see more reviews like this, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!
No comments:
Post a Comment