So having already published a blog entry that kind of had a nostalgic feel for childhood memories earlier today, this seemed like a good opportunity to review a movie which also is focused on nostalgia. At least, it brings many viewers back to memories of their own childhood. Certainly, it brought me back to it, even though I was too young to remember much of anything from the era when this particular movie was taking place.
As I watched this movie, it felt eerily familiar. The more it went on, the more I felt like I was watching an episode of Stranger Things. In fact, Stranger Things had seemed to me to have been just full of imagination and originality before. After watching this movie, however, it felt more and more that Stranger Things borrowed from this so heavily, that it was almost like this was "Part One," if you will, and that the Stranger Things television series was like a sequel.
Really, I'm not kidding. That was how familiar this movie - which I swear I had never seen before, and which I don't even remember specifically having heard of before, even - felt the further along I got.
Here's what's similar (and I hope that I am not giving anything away here): a major accident happens in a small town in the interior of the country. In this movie, it is in western Pennsylvania, while in Stranger Things, the small town is in Indiana. Yet the accident is more than it seems at first. Not just some drunken idiocy, but something with a lot more behind it. Or to borrow from the Transformers, more than meets the eye.
In fact, bizarre things - I didn't want to use stranger or stranger to describe it, for obvious reasons - begin to happen in the town where the accident occurred. At first, it seems like just a few isolated accidents, so nobody is truly alarmed. But before long, the frequency of these accidents and disappearances of local residents, as well as just how bizarre these incidents tend to be, can no longer be ignored.
Ultimately, the fact that these really strange things really are occurring in town can no longer be denied. We see what appears to be a monster, but we only catch a few glimpses of it at first. But it is not so fast that we fail to notice certain things about it. Like it is huge, and incredibly fast. Also, that it is not from here. That in fact, it is mostly likely from out of this world, quite literally.
The local police officer tries to get to the bottom of this, but the military force that is allegedly there to help the town out actually feels a whole lot more like a hostile occupation force. The less answers he gets, the more obvious it seems that he has to take matters into their own hands.
While the officer - who of course is the father of one of the kids - is doing this, the kids themselves go on a mission to recover one of their own. It is the one girl in their group, and of course, the son of the officer has feelings for her. So that is the love story aspect of it, which again, feels very similar to Stranger Things, for obvious reasons (at least if you are familiar with the show).
Now, I do not want to get into much more, in terms of specifics. That would likely give too much away. I feel that I already might have given some of this movie away, at least to those familiar with Stranger Things.
What I will say is this: while I was not familiar with this movie before, I really enjoyed it. And while it did feel more and more familiar as it went along, that is not a bad thing. This movie came out years before Stranger Things ever did, so it felt good to actually see the "original," if you will. There was a sense of the idea that this was where it all started.
Ultimately, this was a fun movie to watch. I did the whole movie watching thing: making some popcorn and sitting and relaxing, just enjoying the movie. And that is what is most important, is that this really is quite a fun movie to watch. Very entertaining, with fast paced action and engaging story lines and dialogue between the characters.
Highly recommended!
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