The 1958 Swedish production of Rymdinvasion i Lappland was purchased by Jerry Warren for American distribution, something the producer/director had done other times in his theatrical career. Usually Warren shelled out for cheap Mexican-made horror films, for which he would shoot new scenes and revamp dubbed dialogue to make the pictures more palatable to American tastes. But with Virgil Vogel's sci-fi monster show, no tampering was necessary; the picture was coherent, interesting, and contained moments of real suspense despite some laughable special effects, plus the actors had all been filmed speaking in English on the original soundtrack. Warren dug in regardless, and the result is Invasion of the Animal People. While the original film's action is indeed tightened in a few spots with some judicious trimming, Warren's extraneous material is thick with ponderous double talk that never advances the story and usually confuses it. Though John Carradine is always welcome in any low-brow flying saucer flick, his quasi-scientific narration fails to tie Diane's celestial visitation and subsequent breakdown (which never happened in the original film) to the rest of the Swedish footage. Warren-shot scenes, like a trio of doctors discussing Diane's seizure ("With the proper tuning instruments, a great deal could be done in the projection of vibrations and controlling the transmission, much the same in reception"), are flat, stagey, and have little in common with the expressive landscape of Lapland as captured by Vogel's lens. Long the only version available in the United States, Something Weird Video has included Invasion of the Animal People as a special feature on the DVD of Rymdinvasion i Lappland(released as Terror in the Midnight Sun). While the original Swedish film isn't terribly remarkable beyond its unique geographic setting, when compared to the muddled jumble that Warren concocted, it shines far brighter than it would on its own.
by Fred Beldin
review
