nathaxnne [hiatus <3]’s review published on Letterboxd:
Tobe Hooper's Invaders From Mars is an anomaly among the 1980's remakes of 1950's B-Movie Horrors because it doesn't attempt to make its source material frightening for a later era so much as it is interested in recreating the feeling of watching those films in the 50's, with all the attendant creepiness and paranoia. Invaders From Mars uses the best available talent (Dan O'Bannon, John Dykstra and Stan Winston among them) to make an intentionally artificial out-of-time world, where everything seems not so much fake as it does made. This is a world not of our own, but made from and out of Sci-Fi Schlock of old. That Hooper turns around and makes the subtexural threat not communism but the return of 1950's America, a return to rigid, bland conformity, a counter-revolution against the liberation movements of the 1960's, the promised land of the Reagan Revolution. This was the creepiest, most unheimlich aspect of living in and through the 1980's itself, the desire to reverse history, to engineer a reactionary paradise out of popular culture, to turn back time to a point which never actually existed in the first place. Invaders From Mars, far more than any other film I have seen, truly gets that and makes that very weirdness into an invasion from without, externalizing the threat to draw attention to it, which is the most Fifties thing you could do with something amorphously terrifying at work in the culture. In my opinion, this is Hooper's own response and follow-up to Poltergeist, a dark revisiting of the suburban nuclear family wherein the danger comes from both without and within, that it could infect your family, infect educational institutions, infect the military and the police, infect lines of communication, that it could infect you. That was what it felt like to be a kid in the 1980's, where you could revolt into an uncaring void or attempt to hide and wait it out and hope that nuclear annihilation did not rain from the skies or get accidentally unleashed at home. Invaders From Mars, by really knowing and inhabiting the 1950's Moviescape, becomes by extension, the most 1980's Movie maybe of all. Hail Hooper! Hail!