Galaxy Invader Is Your Weekend Cheesy Movie

Cheesy movies are a special joy. Despite an earnest attempt to create compelling stories, filmmakers often miss the mark. Some movies turn out simply mediocre. Others become entertaining in spite of their flaws or authorial intent. And yet others thrive on a tone not easily marketed in Hollywood. They become cheesy. In Your Weekend Cheesy Movie, we’ll examine some of these films for what they get wrong — when they get it wrong — and what they right do in spite of the wishes of the studio or the director.

This week: Galaxy Invader

Sometimes, imitation is indeed the sincerest form of appreciation. And other times it ends up looking like a VHS copy of a film taped off cable in the 1980s with the opening and closing minutes missing. This is the tightrope Don Dohler walked all of his career. Born in Baltimore Maryland, he had a passion for movies at an early age. But before he could move on to become a film director in his own right, he imitated things like Mad and the early film magazines. Both endeavors would produce something lasting as his Mad imitation, WILD, birth the underground comix character ProJunior. His Cinemagic — a magazine about making your own special effects at home — became part of the Starlog family of publications. But not long after, he was finally in a position to scratch his original itch. That first endeavor, The Alien Factor, is a film we might talk about someday. Instead, we’re going to talk about his 1985 film, Galaxy Invader, which is not only emblematic of his VHS copy style, but is also your weekend cheesy movie.

The plot centers on the Montague family. They live in relative squalor in the Maryland backwoods. The family patriarch, Joe (Richard Ruxton), is a drunk, liar, and cheat. His daughters Carol (Faye Tilles) and Annie (Kim Dohler) hate his ever-living guts while his somewhat dim son J.J. (George Stover) loyally follows him around in the hopes he might receive some praise from the old man. Oh, also, Joe owns one rather wholly white t-shirt and a rifle he may not known how to use. Wife Ethel (Ann Firth) tries to keep the family together, but it is fundamentally broken. In their first scene together, Joe admonishes Carol for dating a man the film presents as nothing but upstanding. It is almost as though Joe’s inherent corruption blinds him to anything but his own self-interest. Not that anything like that could ever happen in real life, of course.

Joe’s self-interest comes to the fore when he and J.J. encounter an alien being — “the Green Man” as they keep calling him. Joe manages to understand his rifle long enough to shoot the creature and dislodge an orb from its belt. The thing is power source of some kind, so Joe determines he’ll be able to sell it for a lot of money.

He invites Frank Custer (Don Leifert) to inspect the orb, but when Custer learns an alien is roaming the woods, he convinces Joe they can get a even bigger payoff if they bring it alive. The duo convene a hunting party of local drunks. It goes poorly, but Joe, J.J. and Custer manage to capture the creature. Early on, Ethel tells us Custer is the worst man in town — a tall order considering the sleaze dripping off of Joe — and his disregard for the drunks he served up to the alien proves this. Unfortunately for Custer, a local college kid and his professor discover the captured alien, free him, and return the orb to him. It powers his hand blaster, and he kills Custer in the ensuing chaos. Joe ascends to head slime, recaptures the alien, and takes possession of both the orb and the blaster. Leaving his family as the only people who can possible stop him.

And if all of this sounds like an almost coherent science fiction story written by a lad trying to process his father’s rampant alcoholism, that’s part of the charm. Forced to work with a shorter schedule and smaller budget than even he was accustomed to, Dohler focused on character (in his own odd way) and produced an odyssey about a completely failed family. It is impossible to tell if any of this is anyway autobiographical, but a kernel of truth may be why Galaxy Invader finds its fans.

Or, it could be all the ways Galaxy Invader fails as a horror movie. Like Alien Factor, it is astonishingly slow. And not in a contemplative sort of way. Moments just linger. Actors take too long to complete their lines, and jump scares fall flat as arms or the alien lazily wander into frame. Dohler’s company of actors — who either worked with him on earlier movies or, like Ruxton, continued to work him on his subsequent film — are deliciously amateurish. They’re not exactly bad, but their lack of training shows in the muted reactions to the alien, family spats rendered in fake-shouting, and laughably poor stage fighting. But like the accidental charm of the script, these amateur performers sort of engage the viewer in a can-do, high school sort of way. If you ever convinced your friends to perform a script for a school video project, the well-meaning, but out of depth acting will feel very familiar and endear you to just about everyone in the film; including the unfortunate drunks Custer sends in to get slaughtered.

The one exception, though, is Ruxton as Joe. The character is absolute an trashfire and Ruxton gives him an uncomfortable authenticity. While his line delivery is often shaky, he may be a cut above the other performers. Additionally, the movie eventually anchors on Joe as the antagonist, so one imagines Dohler cast him because he had a modicum of talent or re-framed the film around his ability to give this character life. Either way, you will not like Joe — and it is the one genuine success of the film.

But the otherwise amateur feel of Galaxy Invader (Dohler’s fourth film, as it happens) will offer you a micro-budget horror movie you want to cheer on. It will also offer plenty of fodder for you and your friends if you want a bad movie night. And imitating the gang on Mystery Science Theater 3000 might be the best way to celebrate Dohler, a man who tried so hard to imitate the movie-making he loved … even if he ultimately found directing his least favorite part of the process.

Galaxy Invader is not available on the usual streaming platforms, but can be found on a rather well-known video service for free. The movie also shows up on various sci-fi film compilations alongside Dohler’s Alien Factor.