“You just stay here and look pretty ’til we come back.”

Justin’s rating: It’s not so much an “invasion” as it is a “ski lodge promotional video”

Justin’s review: You know why some of us love these old, cheesy, and impossibly fake B-movies? I sincerely believe that it reminds us how imaginations used to work before we forfeited them to the lesser god of CGI. We remember picking up a stick and pretending it was a gun or flipping over a cardboard box and turning it into a spaceship.

Movies like Terror in the Midnight Sun probably weren’t believable or scary even back when they launched. Rather, they were a good time and a trip of the imagination into realms unknown.

Realms like Sweden, which was trying really hard to forge its own movie identity in the ’50s. This scifi/horror flick was retooled somewhat and re-released a couple years later in the US as Invasion of the Animal People, which is a significant downgrade in the title department. It also got the much more excellent Space Invasion from Lapland label slapped on it in some territories. Three titles for one hard-to-watch black-and-white experience.

This 72-minute flick isn’t putting in overtime with its plot developments. A big ol’ alien ship — disguised as a meteor — crash-lands in Finland, a group of tasty and lightly seasoned humans go to investigate, and a Bigfoot-related alien pops out to munch away.

Alas, this film isn’t in any hurry to get to the good stuff. Before we finally arrive at Chewbacca’s cousin Tobacca, we’ve got to endure five minutes of John Carradine lecturing us, old guys hosting numerous meetings in drab rooms, just so much skiing, plus ice skating, a silly romance, flying scenes, and a droning voice narrating between scenes. The promised “invasion” doesn’t ever materialize, as Tobacca keeps meandering over snowfields, a torch-bearing mob (on skis!) follows him, and some mute humanoid aliens show up for a befuddling minute and then disappear again.

It does feel like a poor choice to go black-and-white here, because either we get blindingly white snowfields of Lappland or impossible-to-see night scenes. But at least they ski. Oh boy, do they ever.

Even with its incomprehensible plot and winter sports-themed motifs, Terror in the Midnight Sun is a pioneer of sort, being Sweden’s first B-movie and one of the first European ones, period. I just wish its pioneering status was coupled with a much more gripping tale that included dismembered Swedish figure skaters and ray guns by minute eight. There’s a really cool monster here, but keeping it for the last little bit of the movie feels as though we’re suffering through a timeshare presentation before we can get to the good stuff.

Intermission!

• All great movies begin with a crusty guy delivering a lecture. Twice.
• Did John Carradine just say “groping out?”
• All the fun of newspaper reading! In movie form!
• What are these dorky ski lifts?
• The ship crash actually looked kind of cool
• Ahh smoking on planes, the good days
• Hi random figure skater girl wearing a tiara
• That’s the worst airplane cockpit mockup
• Stowaway girls like to be picked up by their hair
• That stunt person hit that tree seriously hard
• Every alien ship has a knob that makes people fall off ladders
• Pressing a hot wet cloth to a knee heals it completely
• You can outrun a localized avalanche
• Girl be trippin’… a lot
• The Swedish version of the Blue Man Group showed up in the last few minutes here
• That is the tiniest pistol, no wonder the Nazis conquered this country
• In Nordic countries, mobs with torches also cross-country ski
• And like all good alien invasions, it ends with a monster being burned alive and tossed down a hole. That’s exactly what we did to E.T.