Ruthless Reviews presents: I Love a Mystery! Follow our tireless critics of the A-1 Detective Agency as Jack, Doc and Reggie ferret out the best, and worst in movies. Sponsored by Pee Clean, “never fear the pee police again, use, Pee Clean and have clean pee!”
Your host: So fellas, tonight we have a blast from the past. Steven Spielberg’s second and much anticipated film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Well, Doc, Reggie, Jack, is it cinema?
Doc and Reggie: [bursting out laughing] Cinema? Cinema! What the hell.
Pardon me Mater, but I am going to the cin…e…ma. . .
Your Host: Knock it off and talk about the damn movie.
Doc: Ah, well, this is a …movie… about some outer space UFO flyers who want to make friends, but like want to get to know us better as people. Longer than a minute date, but shorter than a long walk in the rain.
Jack: I think you are missing the most reverent aspect of the show. The theme is timely. The government knows all about the visitors from out there, beyond, but the Deep State, in the form of the, Air Force, FBI and very likely; and I say this with all the Fear and Loathing it deserves, the C.I.A. Cover it up going to any and all lengths to conceal the truthiness. Maybe even the D.E.A. Those guys have their fingers in everyone’s pie.
The cover-up by Deep State begins the movie when an airline pilot, perhaps even carrying Mulder and Scully, is harassed by a UFO, playing skytrain chicken. Cluck, cluck. So, traffic control asks if the pilot wants to report the near mid-air crash by the overly friendly ETs, he’s like, Hell no, like I need that Deep State grief! (What a pussy.)
Then we go the Mexican desert that the UFOer use as a dumping- ground/chop-shop for all the stuff they stole. A bunch of Deep State operatives emerge from SVUs and find an old wino sleeping one off, who tells the head guy, a Frenchman who runs around the world collecting UFO stuff for the Deep State, the sun came out the night before and sang to him. The Frenchie looks like, yeah, someone spiked the old fart’s Night Train with mescaline.
But, the Big Surprise is the appearance of a bunch of Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, lost in the Bermuda Triangle , oh so many years ago. Lost? Ha! Stolen by the UFO flyers more like it. Now they have finished their joyride with US government property, they dumped ’em in Mexico, looking better than they looked on the showroom floor. Anybody see the pilots? Huh? Did you even look?
The insurance company is going to come down hard on this one.
Then, the action moves to:
Muncie, Indiana!
What a wonderful name,
Named for Muncietown, of Delaware County fame.
Muncie, Indiana, as a Shakespeare would say,
Trips along softly on the tongue this way–
Muncie, Indiana, Muncie Indiana, Muncie, Indiana,
Let me say it once again.
Muncie, Indiana, Muncie, Indiana, Muncie, Indiana,
That’s the town that “knew me when.“
(With apologies to Meredith Wilson)
Where three-year-old Barry Guiler lives with his single mom in a big scary old farm house. The UFO people decide to put the snatch on the kid right under his mom’s nose, so they magically animate, the Hoover, and TV and (especially the just adorable little monkey playing the cymbals!) all the kid’s toys that causes him to dive through the doggie door attempting to escape the racket. The child is torn from his mother’s arms.
The mom is left screaming and crying in despair while the UFOer escapes in some cloud cover. They intend to study the hapless three-year-old like a prize pig at the county fair. “The Invaders! A Steven Spielberg Production. Starring Richard Dreyfuss as electrical maintenance worker, Roy Neary.
The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. Roy Neary has seen them. For him, it began one night looking for a downed power line on a lonely country road. They mess with the electrical system in his truck. rattle county mailboxes and shake a railroad crossing signal. Monstrous! At least they did not follow him home and steal his kids. (With apologies to Quinn Martin Productions)
Roy: This is nuts!
Yep, the whole wacky adventure begins with Roy Boy chasing after three midsized UFOs followed by a really cute little fourth one tagging along. They jump the toll both at the Ohio line. The purpose of all this madness is to put a huge phallic symbol in the minds the witnesses to the UFOer shenanigans.
Meanwhile, the Deep State crowd travels around the world retrieving stuff like cargo ships the UFOer stole for some happy-horseshit excuse of studying us. The witnesses have actually been invited to a meeting at Devils Tower (the phallus) in the state of Wyoming (first state to give women the franchise!). The Deep State, using geometric logic and a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, discover the location of the big, Witness v UFOer meet.
The Deep State goes to any lengths, stopping at nothing, to prevent the witnesses from attending the meet, but the plucky few elude the Deep State minions and arrive just in time to see the legendary Mother Ship, which looks like a flying top hat the size of the state of Maine, disgorge little Barry and the hundreds of people the UFOer kidnapped and kept from their friends and families for decades in order to, “get to know them better”.
The head UFOer, who looks like the Pillsbury Dough Boy as spokesmen for a new commercial diet product as a former fatty, is followed by what appears to be little kids dressed for a UFOer themed Halloween party. They make nice with a stupefied Roy, smiling a toothless grin at him like Uncle Hector who lives up on the Ridge.
Your Host: Roy is chosen as Deep State ambassador to the UFOers and marched into the huge flying top hat which we see is largely empty (which begs the question: what is all at cargo space going to be used for???). It flies off to the planet Who Gives A Damn in the Black Eye Galaxy.
OK boys, what did you think of it? Somebody wake-up Jack.
Doc: this is a movie about a bunch of ETs that harasses airliners, steals ships and aircraft, kidnaps and holds for decades hundreds of people, including children, and we are supposed to think they are good guys?
Reggie: It’s called, The Spielberg Touch. That solves that mystery of that ET Cargo Cult.
Good Night!