Excellent, smart action film.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Best movie ever!

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Mike Gray came up with a minor masterpiece. I went to see the film because a friend whose judgement about movies I always respected suggested that I take myself down to the dollar theater and watch what can be made for little or no money and a ton of heart and soul. I wasn't disappointed. Gray must have had a particular form of charisma as the actors all seemed to be working to the full extent of their talents and his obvious ability to do so much with so little deeply impressed me. If he'd only had a budget! I wonder what he could have done if Spielberg had donated the crew for Close Encounters meal budget to Gray. As it stands he didn't need more help really. In any case, highly recommended!

Tangerine Dream soundtrack, as always, leaves the movie feeling dreamy and surreal.One of the few films about secret alien bases and experiments that is watchable. The acting and dialogue is top notch. Keenan Wynn makes an appearance and is excellent as usual.The film all feels like it takes place in a single night and into the following day. It blends together many different science fiction motifs fairly well and tries hard on a small budget to be convincing. It's nice to watch a movie that isn't dumbed down.Seems to be a kind of holdout from the seventies psychedelic head flicks in some ways. It has that reformed hippie quality about it.

From an interview on the website: projectcamelot Livermore physicist 'Henry Deacon' Q:What can you tell us about the ET presence? A: Look up the movie Wavelength. It's based on a totally true story. Have you seen it? It's based on an incident that took place at Hunter Liggett. This is a hot one.Q: No. Where's Hunter Liggett? A: 90 miles south-south-east of Monterey, California. My primary station at the time was Fort Ord.I was working there back in the early 70s, when I was in the military, and I was working under CDCEC, which is Combat Developments Command Experimentation Command. You can go look that up.We were doing testing of all kinds of devices, and we lived out in the field there. We wore laser protection goggles a lot of the time and we had our eyes dialated routinely to check our retinas for burns. Some of the cattle in the fields even wore modified goggles! This was the most bizarre sight you could ever imagine.Well, one day something happened while we were testing. A disk came into the area and it was hovering, it hovered right directly in front of us, out in a field. So we shot the ****ing thing down.Q: You shot down a disk? A: We should never have done it. It wasn't me personally, but the group did. Between us we had all this gizmo weaponry and I guess they panicked and thought they were in a movie or something. The disk was disabled and it was captured, and so were the occupants, and I saw these very briefly. They were small child-like humanoids, with no hair. And they had small eyes, not large almond-shaped eyes. I don't think anyone knows about this. As far as I know it's not on the internet.Q: This is incredible. I've never heard of this incident.A: Most of the other witnesses ended up in Vietnam and many were killed. I may be the only living witness to what happened... I don't know.The rest of the story is in a sci-fi movie called Wavelength, which was released in the early '80s. I'd never heard of it until I ran into it years later, in Arizona. Did I just say this? When I saw the video, I was expecting some, you know, light entertainment with a beer or two, but I mean, my mouth just hung wide open. The beginning of the film just completely clearly and accurately describes the incident, and the film is very close to the rest of the story, including the use of an abandoned Nike base in Southern California to store them.Go find it. It's all basically true. I was just amazed when I saw it. The person who wrote it must have been there, or knew someone who was there. But I don't know who.

After viewing this film for the first time (and with an open mind), I feel the need to defend it against the general naysayers who condemn it, claiming that it is nothing but a rip-off. Unfortunately, this film has just about been buried by several bad reviews, and the fact that "E.T." was released just prior to this film, didn't help it, either.The fact is, it's nearly 20 years down the line, and people are still comparing it to "E.T.". I certainly don't feel that this is a rip-off of "E.T.", nor do I feel that it bears much resemblance. It may be true that this film was made with the intent to cash in on the alien/science-fiction trend of that period, but then again, when doesn't that happen in Hollywood? If we are going to compare films about extra-terrestrials, then this one ranks more closely to Steven Spielberg's earlier accomplishment, "CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND".Overall, I enjoyed this film. Robert Carradine and Cherrie Currie (of The Runaways fame) turn in some solid performances, which rise above most films of this caliber. Keenan Wynn, reprising his usual stubborn old man role, is always worth watching. Tangerine Dream provides the music for the film, and as usual, their score is especially effective, and works best in the most critical areas.One has to appreciate the intelligence that the film has, which clearly indicates that this was not just another "hatchet-job" rushed effort, that some would suspect.The end result is, by no means, tremendous. But, this film is extremely underrated, and is at the very least, worthwhile entertainment.If you get a chance, give it a shot.