eople From Space is filmed in a faux-documentary style recalling The Blair Witch Project. Insurance salesman Bob (Richard Deacon lookalike Marc Berlin), his sexy wife, Felicia (Dana Delany lookalike Cindy Klayman), and their friends, video-store clerk Sean (Christopher Titus lookalike Stephen Sheffield) and animal lover Missy (Teri Garr lookalike Spring Hill), discuss how to spend the long weekend. The tightly wound, passive-aggressive Bob suggests birdwatching, apple-picking and a trip to the art museum to look at Edvard Munch paintings. The four decide to go camping at Beaver-Tail Lake in order to find physical evidence of a UFO that reportedly crashed there and so claim a $100,000 reward offered by a local newspaper. While driving to Beaver-Tail Lake, the intrepid four ask directions from a blind man standing before a power plant on a deserted road. A feeble attempt to start a round of "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" is made.
Once in the woods, Bob insists on looking over a map of the terrain surrounding Beaver-Tail Lake. Missy wanders off. "I thought I saw a rabbit," she explains. Survivor-style, sniping interviews are conducted with the individual members of the expedition. Asked if he's afraid of being abducted by aliens, Bob says, "There's nothing abductable about me!"
Mysterious lights in the woods flash obscene messages in Morse Code. The quartet finds what looks like a box full of Junior Mints affixed to a tree in the pattern of an inverted pentagram. Marital aids twist hanging from branches to the music of Gyorgi Ligeti. A stretch of woods inexplicably stimulates very specific nerve centers of three of the UFO investigators. Could aliens be behind the mysterious goings-on?
Genre parody should have held the genre
People From Space is its own worst enemy.
Writer/producer/director/star Marc Berlin and his cast improvised the film based upon a 10-page outline. As an acting exercise, it's quite good. The improvisation and naturalistic delivery, the way in which the actors play off each other, are of a quality one would expect from films made by Spinal Tap alums Michael McKean and Christopher Guest—films like A Mighty Wind and Best in Show. People From Space is a character study, and the insights offered—literally created on camera before the audience—are funny and resonant in a refreshingly deadpan manner. Each character rings true, and all four cast members get kudos for revealing insights into their characters' psyches.
Where People From Space sabotages itself is in its setting and "plot." As is mentioned above, and as Berlin says on the DVD commentary track, the film is "just a character study"—which is all it should have been. The weird stuff, the Blair Witch parody, the contrivance of the crashed UFO, all get in the way of that character study. What could have been a spiffy, low-budget update of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice themes for the post-swingers era gets gummed up by a premise that wouldn't fly in a work of X-Files fan fiction.
People From Space isn't a total loss. Not by a long shot. When it's on, it's dead on. But the non-improvised gags, mostly dealing with things hanging from trees, feel so arbitrary and dumb that the movie becomes tedious at the halfway mark. The nuggets of humor become less and less rewarding as the movie drags itself toward its non-climax.
