Dan Lauria plays Chief Dawson, one of the many 1950s-style characters in Alien Trespass, who come face-to-face with an evil alien and additional alien bounty hunter. This film, opening today, recreates the classic scifi films of yesterday, with a cast that includes Robert Patrick, Eric McCormack and Jenni Baird.

We got to see a preview screening of Trespass a few days ago, and it was pretty fun, although possibly trying too hard to emulate a real 1950s movie.

During the Q&A after Thursday night's screening, and the movie's panel at Wondercon, director Goodwin insisted there was no irony in his 1950s pastiche. Or rather, that any irony would come from us viewing the film, not from the film itself. Movies from the 1950s are unintentionally funny when we watch them now, so Goodwin and collaborator James Swift decided that if they made a 1950s-style SF film now, and played it absolutely straight, it would be unintentionally funny as well.

So you have the cheap rubber-suit monster, the slightly wobbly flying saucer (but done via CG), the theremin, and the painfully earnest acting and dialogue. There's even a thing where someone walks alongside a moving car and the background scrolls behind the person and the car, but when the car stops the background is out of sync.

The rubber monster, the Gota, looks like a "seven-foot-tall penis, with eye in the middle," Goodwin said in the Q&A after the screening. "We put those little fringey things over its eye to try and take that off it." He said he made everybody watch tons of old 1950s movies, to try and keep this one as true to their spirit as possible, and every prop or piece of decoration is as authentic as possible.

What saves Alien Trespass from being just a pure campfest is the quality of the performances. Goodwin managed to score a surprisingly great cast, including Eric McCormack (Will And Grace, Free Enterprise), Jenni Baird (The 4400), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2) and Dan Lauria. They bring absolute conviction to their performances and never wink at the audience or start playing it for laughs.

"When you look at the original movies, [like] It Came From Outer Space, the actors were good and everything, but when you look like it now, it's really funny," said Goodwin. "We had to act like we were living in the 50s, and try really hard." In some ways, with all the world's troubles today, it was nice to go back to a time when "life was simpler, gentler and nicer," with "nothing to worry about except instant nuclear holocaust."

The movie's plot is pretty formulaic and never quite rises above the level of slavishly imitating 1950s storylines. A UFO which crashes near a small town, and two occupants lurch out: the Gota, a one-eyed monster that kills humans, leaving only puddles of water behind, and the spaceman who was keeping it prisoner. The spaceman, Urp, takes over the body of a local astronomer, Ted Lewis (McCormack) and tries to hunt down the Gota before it reproduces and overruns the world. But the town's residents think Lewis has gone crazy, and blame him for the rash of disappearances in town. Meanwhile, a group of joy-riding teens are the only ones who've seen the monster, but nobody will believe them.

The movie starts with a fake 1957 newsreel explaining how all copies of the film Alien Trespass were destroyed after a dispute between the studio and the movie's star. So we're meant to be seeing a lost classic here, that's been miraculously dug out of a basement.

Just to make it absolutely clear this is a 1950s homage, there's a scene where the kids go to a theater to watch The Blob. And we see a clip of the scene where the kids are in the movie theater, and the Blob oozes in and attacks them. And while the Trespass kids are watching this scene - you guessed it - the Gota comes into the movie theater and chases everybody out. It's totally meta.

If you've seen every single 1950s classic several times, and you wish there was one more film along the lines of It Came From Outer Space or The Blob for you to watch, Alien Trespass is literally made for you. I like those 1950s movies, but they're not my favorites, and I don't really enjoy this kind of nostalgia fest. So Alien Trespass wasn't really my cup of tea, but you might find its poker-faced retro-camp totally awesome and fun.

The movie opens April 3 in select markets, and then goes a bit wider the following week. Goodwin and Swift are depending on word of mouth to make this film succeed, so if it sounds cool to you, definitely tell your friends.

Rat Scratch Fever (a homage to Bert I. Gordon's 70s flick The Food Of The Gods, based on the H.G. Wells novel) has new stills and a trailer that we've never seen before. This ultra-campy low budget film follows a group of rats that come to Earth from another planet and take over. For more pics, check out Robert Hood's site, and thanks to Twitch for pointing out this beauty.

Rat Scratch Fever Trailer:

So the campy Alien Trespass flick is going the way of fake mockumentary for promotion? Fine, let's just kick it up a notch...If we're going to pretend that Robert Patrick's past relative made Alien Trespass, then he at least needs to explain that, no this wasn't the ancestor that was really a robot sent back in time to kill John Connor.

Alien Trespass Documentary: Meet The Person

Isn't is a bit early to be stealing from the Terminator, Asylum? Here's the plot:
A small band of resistance fighters battle the cyborgs that have taken control of the planet... Nooooo. That in no way sounds like a total rip off of the Terminator franchise. And did you really think people would get confused? The street date for this direct-to-DVD poor copy is April 28, 2009.

And finally here's a little indie picked up by Quiet Earth about a girl who calls her past self on her cell phone, in hopes of preventing her mother's death in the future. I don't know sounds a lot like that terrible Dennis Quaid movie, but hopefully Cryptic will have a twist.

Cryptic Trailer:
Cryptic trailer

What's the best part of classic black-and-white sci-fi movies from the '50s? According to R.K. Goodwin, who served as an executive producer for the first five seasons of The X-Files, it's that they are "inadvertently funny." So when he set out to make his own classic sf oeuvre - dubbed Alien Trespass - he decided to make a movie that was "intentionally inadvertently funny." What's more, he wants to take audiences back to a time where "there was nothing to worry about - except nuclear holocaust!" He showed us an eight-minute viral video featuring news releases from various NYC press outlets; apparently the main idea of Alien Trespass is that it was itself a classic '50s sf movie starring now-deceased relatives of Robert Patrick, Eric McCormack, and Dan Lauria, and the never-released print of that movie has just been discovered under a New York construction site. In actual fact, Alien Trespass is a recently-made film in which Patrick, McCormack, and Lauria have "more fun than is legal" (says Goodwin). The video ended with the Alien Trespass official trailer.

Goodwin, who brought wife Sheila Larkin (Dana Scully's mom!) along to NYCC, says he studied what he considers to be the three major classics of '50s sf: The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came from Outer Space, and The War of the Worlds. This gave him and Lauria a marvelous chance to badmouth the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which speaks very well for both men. ("If studio executives knew more about the history of film," Lauria pointed out, "they would remake B-movies like Edward G. Robinson's Scarlet Street." Back in the day, he said, the prostitute character had to be called an "actress" to appease censors, and her pimp was an "agent." That could change in today's climate.) Goodwin shot the film using only techniques that would be available in the '50s - no fancy zoom shots, and only three lenses. He aimed to recreate the most amusing earnest special effects from those early efforts, such as an action scene he remembers from Earth v. the Flying Saucers in which the actors are very obviously running on a treadmill that is out of sync with the moving background.

And when Goodwin noted that Alien Trespass was not necessarily intended to be a nonstop laugh riot, Lauria cut in, "Wait 'till you see the monster!" According to them - and to creature designer Joel - it "looks like a seven-foot-tall penis with an eye."

When asked what working on The X-Files was like, Goodwin answered: "Producing a television series is like getting up every morning and being chased by coyotes." One can only assume that producing a sci-fi movie, for him, was like getting up every morning and being chased by a giant penis.

Goodwin says the film works best as a group experience (the better to mock your aliens with, my dear!), and it'll be out April 3.

The film is set in 1957 and shows what happens to the residents of a small California town, when an alien space ship crashes. First comes the monster, then the alien bounty hunter (Urp) and then the cops. It looks like one of those sweet, "If we all put our minds together we can beat this thing" films. Alien Trespass premiered at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival, but we'll have to see where it pops up at next on the festival circuit. [IGN]

Eric McCormack (Will & Grace), Dan Lauria (the Dad from The Wonder Years), and the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) all star in this could-be-clever alien movie. Alien Trespass is a homage to the 50s scifi B-movies and is set in 1957. The cast gets a surprise visit from a meteor, which crashes into a California mountain. An alien, named the Ghota, launches a flying saucer out of the rubble, followed quickly by an intergalactic bounty hunter called Urp (McCormack). He must save the world from the Urp with help from the cast - and one diner waitress. You can catch this campy thriller at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 10 and 11.

Also playing at the festival is Egon and his space kitty Dönci. Egon & Dönci follows the two into space, but will the kitty enjoy weightless space floating? There's only one way to find out for sure: strap your cat to a rocket.

And finally, Frenchy mutants that take forever to turn to rotting undead have a new trailer in Mutants, and it looks fantastic. Leave it to the French to make a horror movie I want to see. This feature debut comes from David Morley, and I cannot wait to hear more French screams.