Cody is making his way through all 400+ movies made by Charles Band. This time, a drive-in classic about aliens and revenge.
Laserblast is a movie I was aware for years before I finally had the chance to watch it. It wasn’t available to rent from any of my local video stores and I never caught it on cable, so I didn’t cross paths with it until September of 2010... but the wait was worth it, because I got to see this movie for the first time under the perfect circumstances: it was screened at an all-night horror movie marathon held at a drive-in theatre. That was the first drive-in experience I had had in around twenty years, and I had a lot of fun that night, kicking back in my car, eating popcorn and french fries and watching horror movies from the '70s and '80s play out on a big screen in need of a fresh paint job. The marathon's lineup: Jaws, Tentacles, Demons, Burial Ground, and Laserblast. It was awesome, and Laserblast was a very cool movie to end the night with.
Kim Milford stars as Billy Duncan, a young man who appears to have it all: he’s fit, good looking, owns a van, and has a pretty girlfriend named Kathy, played by Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith. But his life isn’t going as smoothly as you’d expect. His mom keeps running off to Acapulco with random men; he’s targeted by local cops Deputy Ungar (Dennis Burkley) and Deputy Jeep (Barry Cutler), who smoke the weed they confiscate from teenagers and cause car accidents with their bad driving; he’s sometimes blocked from seeing Kathy by her off-kilter grandfather Colonel Farley (Keenan Wynn), who likes to rant about “Operation Sand Dust” and “hush-hush” doings over at the military base Cherry Point; and he’s bullied by a pair of local guys, Mike Bobenko as Chuck Boran and Eddie Deezen as “Froggy.” And when you’re being bullied by Eddie Deezen, one of the greatest nerds in cinema history, you know life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Things start looking up for Billy when he discovers a laser-blasting weapon out in the desert. Billy doesn’t know how this cannon got out there, but we do. It belonged to a green-faced alien guy who loses a duel with a pair of stop-motion aliens in the opening sequence. The green-faced dude got zapped out of existence, but the other aliens left his laser gun behind. Now Billy has it, and he enjoys making things explode with it.
Those aliens make this a very important entry in the career of producer Charles Band because it was the first time he ever worked with stop-motion animator David Allen. Allen’s work here was awesome, as it was in everything he worked on (there’s an obvious reason why he earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on the 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes), and Band wisely made him one of his frequent collaborators. They continued working together on various projects right up until Allen’s untimely death from cancer in 1999, at the age of 54. The stop-motion effects are easily the best thing about Laserblast.
The writers of the film also worked with Band more than once. Franne Schacht co-wrote the script for his erotic musical Fairy Tales, while Frank Ray Perilli had written almost everything Band had produced at this point: Last Foxtrot in Burbank, Mansion of the Doomed, Cinderella, End of the World, and Fairy Tales. Now to the fold was director Michael Rae, an occasional actor, stunt coordinator, and second unit director who made this his only feature directorial effort.
Laserblast drew inspiration from two big releases of the time: it was made to cash in on the science fiction craze that was set off by the 1977 release of Star Wars, and the “downtrodden teen finds a unique method of revenge” concept was inspired by the hit Stephen King adaptation Carrie, released in ‘76. This story just swaps the gender of the lead and gives him an alien laser-blaster instead of telekinetic abilities. There is a touch of the supernatural in here, though: the more Billy uses the laser-blaster, the more he seems to be infiltrated by the soul of the dead green-faced alien. His physical appearance starts to change, and not even a visit to a doctor played by Roddy McDowall can counteract the transformative effects of the laser-blaster. By the end, Billy is looking like a full-on alien himself.
Government agent Tony Craig (Gianni Russo) is on the case, but you can figure that he’s primarily in the movie just to pad out the 82 minute running time because the real showdown is going to be between Billy and those stop-motion aliens, who return to Earth to retrieve that weapon they left behind. It’s not much of a showdown, but that’s where it’s all going...
Laserblast is quite goofy, but it’s a really fun movie and I love the look of those David Allen stop-motion aliens. The look and oddball vibe of this film is exactly what I think of when I hear the term “drive-in movie.” This is a drive-in era classic, and I’m really glad that I got to watch it for the first time on a drive-in screen.
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