I don’t cook often, so when I actually decide to use the oven for its purpose rather than a convenient place to stack things, I prefer to go all out. A good pasta sauce must incorporate mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, canned tomatoes, garlic cloves, garlic powder, basil, sugar, red wine, fairy teeth, leprechaun hearts, and anything else I find laying around the kitchen. The result isn’t always that tasty, but at least I feel like I’ve worked for it.
That seems to be the approach of filmmaker Deran Sarafian in 1987’s The Falling (also known as Alien Predators).
Quick Plot: Two guys and a girl (Lynn-Holly Johnson, all grown up into a shrill actress following the wonderfully cheesy Ice Castles) are driving an RV through Spain. Why? Um. Vacation, I suppose, although it’s never quite explained. Johnson plays Sam, whose main character quirk is that she’s an awful cook (like me!) and is not dating either of the men she’s traveling with. In fact, she doesn’t even seem to really consider either friends, which makes this vacation all the more confusing so I’ll quickly move on to a plot that makes sense.
Skylab hath fallen, infecting a hungry cow, who then dies and infects a hungry dog, and so on. A pair of cuddly old NASA scientists investigate, get infected, then eventually find our trio, the only other people in this pretty Spanish town save for a mysterious silent dude wearing a creepy plastic face mask and an unseen driver who cruises around in a very dirty truck. I think this all has something to do with each other, but then we cut back to the three mildly attractive white people arguing over gasoline and I start playing Internet Boggle.
The Falling, in case you’re unsure, is really not a very good movie. Competently made? Sure. Funny? No. Scary? Not at all. The practical effects are fairly impressive and the entire storyline offers plenty of nostalgia, but the actual film? Eh. You have to work harder than two obviously placed Twilight Zone references to make this hardened horror fan care.
High Points
I won’t fault most of the special effects, which have a pleasantly gooey old school practicality to them that works all the way to the final frame
Low Points
Normally, I’d be cheerleading away for a film that incorporates nuclear bombs, carnivorous critters, tumory necks, masked madmen, killer trucks, and car chases, but when all these ingredients are just tossed in and messily tied together by three uninteresting leads and an overly emotional soundtrack, I’m just bored
Lessons Learned
Some facts about Spain: it has no coyotes and its people always try to get to bed before 3:45AM
Any red-blooded American would climb up an elevator shaft
As a pretty young blond, you can overcome any perilous situation by constantly burying your teary face into the chest of any male character that comes your way (it happens three times)
Upon further Googling, I think it might just be Lynn Holly Johnson’s signature move
Stray Observation
The second assistant director is credited simply as “Pepe,” a fact that I found more amusing than the majority of The Falling
Rent/Bury/Buy
The Falling is streaming on Netflix, so those always on the lookout for random ‘80s horror could do worse. I wouldn’t invest any real effort into tracking it down, since the film is neither so-bad-it-s-good nor actually good. It’s there. And now I've already forgotten it existed.
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