In the spring of 1977 -- April to be exact -- I visited Toronto with a friend. Our mission, which we did accept, was to tour OECA (Ontario Educational Communications Authority; now TVOntario).My friend and I took a break and visited a shop downtown which happened to have a magazine rack, loaded with a good spread of material. One particular magazine caught my eye as on the front was a full-sized photo from Star Wars, a movie that I had just heard of a few weeks before. I bought it.
On the bus ride home I scanned this sweet new magazine; specifically, issue 7 of 'Starlog'. In addition to a run-down on Star Wars were bits and bites on various other science fiction and fantasy movies, one of which was an interesting-sounding film, shot here in Canada, by the name of Alien Encounter. I can still picture the picture affixed to the blurb: Tiiu Leek and Christopher Lee. "Christopher Lee?" The text said something about Encounter being a throwback to 50s sci-fi flicks, but with the advantage of colour photography.
A few months later, Starship Invasions, its new name, was released to a theatre near you. Considering that Star Wars hit the screens a few months earlier and had set the bar for what is expected from "space movies", Starship was fun, with some impressive visual effects. I really dug the effect of a flying saucer crashing at high speed into the First Canadian Place tower (now BMO).
A few weeks after this a friend threw down a copy of Cinema Canada Magazine onto the table where I was seated, specifically opened at the page where Starship Invasions had been reviewed. I reviewed the article and thought it was an honest summation.
Well, dear readers, for those of you who care, for your reading enjoyment above is a photocopy I made years ago of the story in question. (I found it while looking for work-related stuff a couple of weeks ago. Cripes, I have a veritable Library of Congress here at home; looks like the attic at that establishment.)
* By the way, the budget figure of one million dollars as itemized in the review is incorrect. (In addition, Douglas Trumbull supervised the visual effects for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, not Star Wars. The reviewer meant John Dykstra.) Someone who worked as a higher-up on Starship Invasions told me that it cost just under two million to produce. Someone else told me that one pet name used by the crew during production was "Alien Turkey". On that note, Happy Thanksgiving to our dear neighbours to the south.
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