The whole film is really like an extended version of the scenes in Melinda Dillon’s house in Close Encounters where the UFOs cause things to come to life. You could almost call it a UFO haunted house story. It opens particularly well. Young Natasha Ryan finds a glowing green pyramid in the corral, which wishes back her vanished pony and then subsequently does things like turn on taps for her and causes mini-aliens to appear in the house. There’s the rather appealing scene where the car starts playing up and Ryan says “Okay, car, I want you to stop fooling around, you’re scaring my mommy” – and to everybody’s surprise it does. Cardos manages to generate quite an atmosphere of mysteriousness – there’s the supremely eerie moment where Jim Davis shoots at the UFO and it simply freezes the bullet’s trail in mid-air. The film clearly doesn’t have the budget of Close Encounters, but does compensate quite adequately. The special effects are quite decent for the film’s clear B budget, with some nice planetary mattes, animation and decent UFO models.

If that were all there were to the film, it would be a fair-to-modest effort. But it falls apart in the second half. And unfortunately it’s the dopey-looking stop-motion animated creatures that almost entirely kill it. These come from special effects man David Allen, a regular contributor to and sometimes director of Band’s films, and are lumpen, awkward and quite unconvincing. They are never seen in the same shots as people and convince as being nothing other than cheap-looking, amateur movie-level stop-motion effects. And after these creatures appear the film abruptly wraps it up with a mysterious dust storm and a time warp, ending with the family reunited on an alien planet heading towards a shining city of light.

Jim Danforth’s matte of the city is certainly the best special effect in the film. But as an ending goes this is a flopperoo. Aside from the fact that we have no idea where they are, it feels like a film that had one fine first act, but lacked anything else and so merely wrapped it up on a banal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)-esque arrival at a transcendent place of galactic communion because it didn’t really have any idea where else to go. There’s no explanation throughout for the pyramid, the aliens or the agency behind them, or why some of the aliens appear at be at war with others. Indeed it’s really a film without any drama – the family’s only role throughout has been a reactive one to the phenomena happening around them – they never do anything and so when the arrival at the end comes, it feels hollow and meaningless.