Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #175 Invasion (1997)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Gayheart’s greatest strength as a film actress is undoubtedly her magnetic, otherworldly presence. Even in a realm where beauty is the norm Gayheart stands out as unusually, distractingly, heart-stoppingly gorgeous.
It’s consequently easier to buy Gayheart as an alien princes than as someone who works down as the post office. So perhaps the only surprise in the 1997 science fiction mini-series Invasion is that it is a movie about an alien invasion of body snatchers and Gayheart is not cast as a mysterious alien beauty.
Instead Gayheart is cast as Cassy Winthrope, the substitute teacher girlfriend of Beau Stark (Luke Perry), an ambitious young man excited about interviewing for a position running a non-profit for Randy North, a hard-charging superstar businessman who at least has the decency to be very open about being an evil piece of shit.
They’re just your bland, typical young couple until one fateful evening following a meteor shower Beau picks up what appears to be a shiny black stone that is actually an evil alien intelligence that takes over the body and mind of whoever touches it.
Cassy senses that something is different about Beau. He’s more aggressive in his love making. Also, his personality changes instantly and dramatically, for the worse. The good man she fell in love with is mysteriously replaced by a glowering asshole with no time for her because he alway seems to be conspiring furtively with other “people” with the same glazed, inhuman expression as him.
Like way too many science-fiction movies Invasion make the lazy choice that evil aliens are basically just assholes, interplanetary yuppies who are cold and heartless and obnoxiously hung up on the whole “conquering earth” thing.
They’re able to effectively impersonate the human beings whose bodies and minds they’ve colonized for nefarious purposes but it’s a pretty half-assed interpretation of humanity. They’re not giving it much effort.
The evil aliens are like cynical actors phoning it in. They’re 90 percent of the way there when it comes to to accurately capturing what it means to be a human being on planet earth but then they get lazy and figure they don’t have to bother with complexities like personality, humor and warmth.
There's no specificity to their arbitrary impressions of earthlings: all of the aliens apparently settled on, “just barely pretending not to be from outer space until the invasion occurs” as the kind of human being they would portray.
It turns out that something HAS happened to Beau. His evil alien overlords have given him the all-important job of transforming the human population into aliens and preparing a great gateway through which his alien masters can invade and conquer this planet and its miserable inhabitants.
Beau is such an intergalactic badass that not only does he get the job running the charity of a brutal businessman played by inveterate scene-stealer Neal McDonough: pretty soon the ostensible titan of industry is taking orders from Beau. Of course it helps that Beau slid the millionaire a black stone that turned him into an alien.
Invasion held my interest for three wobbly hours largely due to the wildly entertaining scenery-chewing of Luke Perry, who is clearly having a ball playing a larger than life alien monster out to conquer earth.
Perry throws himself into the role’s outsized villainy. As the movie progresses and the alien invasion draws nearer Beau grows progressively less humanoid and increasingly monstrous and alien.
First he has weird boils on his neck and face and then he begins to look like a zombie slacker in loose fitting clothes but by the end he is a full-on extraterrestrial, without even the faintest resemblance to noted human dreamboat Luke Perry.
What used to be Beau is now intent on world domination, but he can’t stop thinking about those cold, impersonal love-making sessions with Cassy and how they inspired in him an emotion you hu-mans call “love.”
The evil space alien formerly known as Beau’s feelings towards Cassy complicate his plans for world domination. Granted, he’s still an evil, monstrous alien intent on enslaving humanity but he’s not quite as heartless as he once was.
The aliens do a pretty half-ass job of impersonating human beings. They are similarly sloppy in hiding what they’re doing. Sure, if you’re completely oblivious you might not catch on but if you suspect that something might be up, as Cassy does once her boyfriend starts acting like an evil space alien hell-bent on world domination, it’s pretty obvious that those dead-eyed, scowling ghouls just barely pretending to be human are not what they claim to be.
Cassy goes on the run, and using a fantastical new thing called the “Inter-net” is able to hook up with a group of uninfected humans who fortuitously happen to include a number of medical and scientific geniuses capable of creating a cure for the alien contagion in a mere matter of days.
Kim Cattrall costars in the perversely thankless role of brilliant, intense Sheila Moran, a doctor who becomes one of the leaders of this group of non-infected survivors intent on finding a cure for the virus and preventing the looming alien apocalypse.
Invasion arrived at a strange point in Cattrall’s career. It had been a solid decade since she'd established herself as the sexy young star of iconic movies like Porky’s, Police Academy, Big Trouble in Little China and Mannequin but was still a year away from achieving immortality as sexy Samantha in Sex & the City.
When she made Invasion Cattrall was in a bit of professional rut. She was a working actress and Invasion was clearly just a job for her. It’s refreshing, I suppose, that the mini-series does not sexualize the doctor but it’d also be nice if her character had any character. Instead she’s just as driven and devoid of personality as the evil space aliens she’s trying to prevent from taking over our fragile planet.
Invasion seems to have used up its entire make-up budget on Perry’s larger-than-life outer space super-villain. The two-part mini-series, which ran on NBC on May 4th and May 5th, 1997 cuts corners at every turn.
The premise sure sounds expensive but Invasion saves money by having the humans fighting the aliens do all of their business in a series of drab, interchangeable rooms while the alien using Beau’s hot body does his business in a similarly unexciting military base. The special effects, meanwhile, are primitive even by the standards of the time.
Invasion is a space alien invasion movie like every other but its three hours passed relatively painlessly, largely thanks to Perry, who never quite sells the idea that his evil alien conniver is so obsessed with Gayheart’s otherworldly beauty that it compromises his mission, but is enormous fun all the same.
Gayheart was frequently cast in small roles centering on her exotic beauty but she’s one of the leads in Invasion. Her relationship with Beau is the film’s core but Invasion needs to do more than spend ten minutes lazily establishing Beau and Cassy as beautiful, bland white people in love upfront if it wants us to be emotionally invested in their relationship to that degree.
Invasion really does not need to be three hours long. It could easily be a movie rather than a mini-series but if I might continue to lavish it with faint praise there are certainly worse ways to spend a morning.
Perry was a true star of the big and small screen who was always worth watching no matter how dodgy or forgettable, or, in this case, generic the material might have been.
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