The UFO Files

I love films that contain lines like "We'll see what happens when religious Southern sharecroppers are attacked by a dozen glowing little men, and we'll watch them respond in the only way they know how..." followed by shots of rednecks grabbing their shotguns and headin' out to blow them glowin' little heads off. Such is the unintentional humor of The UFO Files, an amateurish attempt to emulate the style and content of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. We meet the Trent family whose 1940 photos of a UFO look suspiciously like a hubcap flung across the backyard fence. We find them old and in ill health, rambling on about, oddly, the lack of royalties they have received from the years of unauthorized use of their picture, and who accidentally admit during an interview that they actually had hubcaps in their back yard. Then we meet Ida Karrenburg, a woman who was abducted by aliens, and whom, the narrator tells us ominously, "went through an experience that brought her to the brink of a mental breakdown." Watching Ida dangling her crucifix over her Ouiji board, I frankly suspected she was pretty wacko before the abduction and if the aliens kidnapped her to study the human race, no wonder they only make sporadic and secret visits to this planet. As Ida fell into a hypnotic trance and began to channel "aliens," saying "my father was a time traveler from Atlantis," I found myself longing for an episode of The X Files, just to have a little "reality" back in my life. Not recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Ray)