This was REALLY bad and poorly made, and I'm being kinder to it than I should be, both because of its decent first half and the charm and beauty of the starring female protagonist, Debbi Pick (this seems to be her only film credit)--also it was obviously made on a super-low budget in my native country, Canada. There were some interesting ideas that would have made a decent film in much better hands (I have previously watched Rebane's later works, 'The Alpha Incident' and 'Twister's Revenge!', and this makes a 'trinity of tripe' that should best be avoided), and the cinematography is decent, simply because it's outdoors and shot in beautiful surroundings with natural light, most of the time. The low-budget special effects were abysmal, and incidents like plane crashes are simply off-screen and left to the viewer's imagination, so that Rebane doesn't have to show it.I saw this under the title 'They', in my Mill Creek 50-pack, 'Nightmare Worlds'--this by far was one of the worst and least interesting of the bunch. Do yourself a huge favour and if you see Rebane's name on a film (at the very least, for these three mentioned), don't touch them with a ten-foot pole. They're neither worth your time nor energy.

Although I remember panning "Giant Spider Invasion" and "Monster A Go Go" here on IMDb, I thought that the Spider film at least had a little energy and some comic interest. And "Monster" was just deliriously bad -but it wasn't entirely Rebane's fault (as I understand it) because some one else picked it up and tried to edit it into a different movie altogether. And I remember "Twister's Revenge" as being silly, but mildly amusing...there was a tank and a monster truck crushing things at one point,and the hero got thrown through a barroom window. However...if "Giant Spider Invasion" is Rebane at his best, this movie (and "The Alpha Incident") are examples of movies where he didn't manage to make them entertaining even by accident. Listen...if you don't have any money for special effects and you can't really write dialog, and you can't really do a good plot, and you can't really direct the actors in any helpful way, and the actors have no real idea of what they are doing...if you have all those problems and you are relying on scene after scene of spoken exposition to carry and advance the plot, plus you never really let the audience in on what the aliens are or what they want...then your movie is in serious trouble. In fact, it's going to suck, and not in a good way (the "so bad it's good" way either.)The basic concept is sound enough - George Romero took a similar situation and turned it into "Night Of the Living Dead" - but Rebane manages to strip his movie of any conceivable energy, interest or dramatic tension in the first 5 minutes, and after that I was checking the time display menu on the DVD player every 30 seconds to see how much of this bore-fest I had left to go.I wouldn't watch this movie again unless it was under the influence of high grade Mary Jane (not that I indulge), and neither should you.

Okay, most of the film is pretty boring: people sitting around in a cabin, listening to an alian invasion, nothing much happening in terms of group dynamics. Special effects are beyond belief. That's something that would not have happened to Ed Wood, he would have made an awful film on the same budget but with much better special effects. However, the film does have its redeeming features. The idea of having radio/TV stations still running while earth is being taken over clearly influenced Romero in Dawn of the Dead. Some dialogue is reasonably funny and some shots are pretty atmospheric. like the deserted airport in the beginning. The final scene is really funny, the last survivors turn into Adam and Eve in a completely over the top scene, and it's not the hunk but the nerd who gets the girls. That's funny. However, the music takes the biscuit. The theme tune is a rip off of The Good, the bad and the Ugly and no one except for the great Ed Wood in Jail Bait has ever used music so completely clueless. 20 or 30 minutes less and the film would have been acceptable.

It's amazing how often the words 'god-awful' appear in the reviews of this movie - er - on second thoughts, no it isn't. This really is a god-awful movie and the most god-awful part of it - eclipsing the non-script, the non-acting and the execrable un-special effects, is the incredible amount of really bloody awful music in this movie. The soundtrack is a masterpiece of incoherence ranging from tinny renditions of what sounded suspiciously like Morricone's 'The Good The Bad and The Ugly' theme played on a Stylophone to mellow Spanish guitar music, to 10 second loops of synthesised rock - ALL IN THE SAME SCENE! This isn't a soundtrack to a movie. It's a John Cage concert.