STRANGE INVADERS

   Film (1983). EMI Films/Orion/A Michael Laughlin Production. Dir Michael Laughlin, starring Paul Le Mat, Nancy Allen, Diana Scarwid, Michael Lerner, Wallace Shawn, Fiona Lewis. Screenplay William Condon, Laughlin. 93 mins. Colour.

   A very agreeable pastiche of movies like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) (PARANOIA). The prologue shows a flying saucer (UFOS) landing in a small town in 1958. The rest of this charming SATIRE is set in 1983, when entomologist Charlie (Bigelow) comes to learn that Centerville (the town) is now occupied by ALIENS in human form, that hiswife (Scarwid) is an alien - he had previously regarded her blank manner as normal - that his (half-breed) daughter is to be taken with the aliens when they leave, and that New York is being infiltrated. The alien anthropological survey team have adopted the appearance and manner of small-town Americans of the Eisenhower years, and naturally appear grossly out of place in modern New York. (MEET THE APPLEGATES [1990] adopts a similar premise.) Director Laughlin has his cake and eats it too by injecting genuine suspense into a story that is also deeply funny. This is the second of a projected but unfinished Strange trilogy from Laughlin, the first being DEAD KIDS (1981; vt Strange Behavior).

   PN