It’s 2 a.m. You are awoken from a sound sleep by a green light emanating from the window. You step outside to investigate. The glow is coming from a dense group of trees, just beyond your backyard. As you hop the fence and step towards the light, your body is seized by what feels like massive, invisible hands. You rise off the ground. The trees part and the light reveals a floating VHS tape. The tape glides towards you and enters an opening in your stomach, Videodrome-style. Your breath is labored. You close your eyes.
Instead of darkness, you see the flicker of an image, as if your eyelids have transformed into miniature CRT television screens. Through the static, two words emerge:
UFO KIDNAPPED
With your body immobilized, you have no choice but to watch the transmission.
A burglar attempts to rob a haunted house, only to be caught in the tractor beam of a UFO. Two brothers named Alasdair and Kevin (plus Amber, their Golden Retriever) are camping. They are also captured by the alien force. Once on board the ship, the kids meet the Loolis, furry extraterrestrials that are also telepathic empaths, and ship commanders called the Shandrillas, who tell them: “We want to keep you as pets.” Alasdair and Kevin befriend a girl named Klea who is being held captive. The kids distract the Shandrillas so that the Loolis can help Alasdair command the spaceship with his mind. After falling into a black hole, the ship lands on a distant planet that’s infested with monsters known as Merkarans. There is also pizza.
UFO Kidnapped encompasses everything that’s magical about lost media. Produced by Nickelodeon and shot on video in Ontario, the 50-minute series pilot is a serious attempt at creating a sci-fi television show for children. But that’s not what happened. UFO Kidnapped reconstitutes ideas from Return of the Jedi, E.T., and Land of the Lost and sends them on a grim voyage of accidental, avant-garde surrealism. The tape-sourced visuals utilize bitmapped overlays, green screen, distorted mirrors, and composited images. Spaced-out Atari sound effects accompany the minimalist synthesizer score, which stabs and thumps like it’s auditioning for a low-budget slasher like The Boogeyman. Peggy Poynton’s frightening creature designs reimagine Ewoks as dumpster-diving cryptoids and Jawas as razor-toothed, one-eyed maniacs. UFO Kidnapped is literally about people getting UFO kidnapped. But the true abduction is the one that the movie performed on my brain. And I can’t wait until it happens again.
My copy of UFO Kidnapped is a third-generation VHS bootleg of the movie’s original, one-time broadcast in January, 1984. Whoever did the home-taping didn’t include the commercials. But after the feature, they were nice enough to tape several episodes of You Can’t Do That on Television, Nickelodeon’s long-running comedy show that features much of the same cast and crew of UFO Kidnapped. After watching this three-hour tape in a state of maximum bliss, I could only smile and think of the immortal words of pop icon Jan Terri:
