Julie Bucker (Jane Rudowski) and Joe Drunk (Allen M. Johnson) are a young couple making out in the woods near the small town of Grand Bosh. Suddenly, overhead they see a UFO. A car drives up with some other teenagers in it. Joe decides to go off with the other teens to find the UFO. Julie and another girl stay with Joe’s car. The driver of the other car is Wendell Shrank (Paul Zdechlik). When they reach a roadblock manned by a police officer (Robert Havel) the teens run over the cop several times and the deputy loses his hand but he gets up and acts as it nothing happened. He sends the kids away.
The girls end up stranded and are forced to walk home. On the way they are picked up by the alien cop that had manned the roadblock. Then the girls disappear. In the morning Julie’s father tries to report her missing but Sheriff Ed Munchinson (William Vanarsdale) is not very helpful.
The town doctor, Doc Savel (Robert Buckley) has his hands full with people spontaneously combusting. The aliens take over a local farmhouse. The vegetation in the area appears to be hands that are growing out of the ground. The local gas station owner (John Bruhn) has a contract to store nuclear, or as he puts it, New Clear waste. The aliens send in some ninja aliens to try to keep the populace in line. Sheriff Munchinson tries to contact the Department of Bureaucracy in Washington to get help. The government, of course, is useless and decides that the only recourse is to drop an atomic bomb on Grand Bosh.
“It Came From Somewhere Else” was released in 1988 and was directed by Howard Hassler. It is a low budget American science fiction comedy spoof done in the 50’s science fiction format. The film is difficult to find.
The movie is mostly done in black and white; except for a strange little striper number done in the middle of the film, and other bits and pieces, such as when there is blood spurting around. The stripper scene has absolutely nothing to do with the lame plot. My theory is that the gratuitous nudity and violence is something you wouldn’t see in a 50’s sci-fi film. To make those sections in color was actually brilliant, but don’t tell anyone I said so.
The rest of the film is a string of every science fiction and or comedy parody trope ever put on film, including sight gags, one-liners, and slap stick and a strange “Fail Safe” style vignette. In addition, the movie also sports a fake 3-d movie within a movie.
A lot of people liked the film and found it funny. I found it lame, scattered and very unfunny. It seems to be a guy’s kind of movie. To me it makes “Airplane” 1980 look like Oscar material. Everything that was supposed to fly was on strings and obvious dummies were used for anything shot in the air or blown up. At one point the top of a Weber grill is supposed to be blown off but you could see it swing back into frame from time to time. That appeared to be unintentional, but I found it to be the best part of the film. All the special effects were childish, but I didn’t have a problem with that since the film was done like that on purpose. It is a kitchen sink movie. Everything was thrown in.
It is one of those movies that I hated, but I seem to be in the minority so you can’t go by me. If you like movies with no real plot or cohesion, bad acting and worse jokes then you may love it.