ALIEN LOVER (1975)
Article #1491 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-14-2005
Posting Date: 9-11-2005
Directed by Lela Swift
Featuring Kate Mulgrew, Pernell Roberts, Susan Brown

A teenaged girl moves in with relatives after being released from a sanitarium. She thinks she is going crazy again when she begins to hear voices, but it turns out that an alien from another dimension is trying to communicate with her from a strange TV set in the attic. Is the alien benevolent or sinister?

This is an under-rehearsed soap-opera style TV movie shot on videotape. Some people feel that movies shot in this style seem more “real” than movies with higher production values, and maybe it is for them; for me, when I see a movie like this, all I can think about is that it’s an under-rehearsed soap-opera style TV-Movie shot on videotape. In order to have that “real” quality, you need a script that captures that sense, and the script for this one fails utterly on this level. The movie never achieves any intimacy; all the characters are distant, unlikable and/or obviously insincere, and it’s hard to care about them or what happens to them. I also dislike the ending; though some people feel that ending the story at the point it does lends a great deal of ambiguity to the movie; me, since I find very little ambiguity in the alien’s intentions, I just feel that they ended it where they do because taking the story any further would have required more of a budget that they had. And as far as movies about sinister TV sets go, I’d rather watch THE TWONKY again than this one.