Invaders from Mars

But this was the end of a three-film deal that Hooper had with Canon.

And this, of course, before this was Invaders from Mars.

Yeah, which is a very underappreciated love letter to old school sci-fi cinema.

And then before that, his first film for Canon, Life Force, is this amazing tribute to Mario Bava and an amazing tribute to just... ah, it is literally the greatest space vampire film ever made.

Yeah.

Uh, and he wrote In- Invasion from Mars, Invaders from Mars.

He's just a kind of an okay writer, but I think the best stuff is probably coming from Strick.

Would you call him a hack?

we're

definitely having some fun for this last one tonight it's 1986's invaders from mars directed by toby hooper this movie follows a young boy who sees a flying saucer land near his home and realizes the adults around him are slowly being taken over by alien invaders Now, Invaders from Mars feels like a movie built out of a kid's nightmare.

It's a remake of the 1953 film, but Toby Hooper does not turn it into a slick, modern alien invasion thriller.

Instead, he leans into the artificial quality of it.

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great as david the young boy who sees the invasion before anybody believes him karen black i think brings a a wonderfully offbeat warmth as the school nurse who starts to trust him and the rest of the adult cast just gives the movie that uneasy feeling that every grown-up might be either a little bit useless suspicious or already taken over which depending on your childhood may feel disturbingly accurate and as a canon films release invaders from mars was ambitious in that wonderfully wobbly canon way you can see the effort in the creative work the sets and the big finale but you can just feel the tone bouncing around sometimes it's creepy sometimes it's goofy sometimes it feels like a saturday matinee that wandered into the wrong cinema the movie made about 4.9 million dollars against a 7 million dollar budget so it was a theatrical misfire but this is exactly the kind of movie that could survive in the video store era the box art the title the alien promise the toby hooper name that was enough to get a curious kid to pick it up and wonder if they were making a terrible decision i mean it is uneven but it's exactly the kind of canon movie that sticks in your head too strange to be polished too specific to be disposable and built like a kid's bad dream that somehow made it onto the video store shelf.

Give him a message for me.

Yeah, I've seen his two Chainsaw films, I've seen Poltergeist.

But like a lot of his smaller films, you know, like Invaders from Mars or-

Mm-hmm

...

I have seen people reevaluating that film, and it sounds messy, but interesting.

Yeah, I really wanna watch it.

Uh, the other one is 1986's remake of Invaders from Mars.

And-

Yeah.

In working on, um, Conan the Barbarian, Masters of the Universe, and Invaders from Mars.

Actually, let's, let's, let's kind of reverse that.

Masters of the Universe, it came out with a remake, right?

And, uh, I started using Tony on all my films.

He was just fantastic.

Masters of the Universe, he does, he built Gwildor's garden, uh, and, uh, he built, uh, weapons for me for, the Martian weapons for Invaders from Mars.

And Tony was great to work with.