B-Sides: It Stinks!

Steve Barton   |  

Sep 29, 2012

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Few people would even know of Pod People, AKA Extraterrestrial Visitors, AKA Los Nuevos Extraterrestres had it not been famously featured on “Mystery Science Theater 3000″. If you’ve ever seen that episode of MST3K, then you already know you’re about to “Hear the Engines Roll”. You also know that “It stinks!”

Juan Piquer Simon could be considered Uwe Boll before there was an Uwe Boll. For a while there he was in many film circles considered the worst filmmaker; at least he was until Albert Pyun stole that mantle. I don’t really think either comparison is fair seeing as how I consider Slugs, Endless Descent, and Pieces to be damn fine b-movies. On the other hand, Pod People or Extraterrestrial Visitors or whatever you want to call it is so flippin’ terrible it’s really only best viewed with the accompaniment of Joel, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo.

The year was 1983. One year earlier a little film called E.T. broke box office records. So why not make a cheap Spanish knock-off about a kid living in the woods who befriends a dwarfish alien that looks like ALF with the head of a mongoloid aardvark? But during this time period slasher movies about teenagers heading out into the woods are also real popular so what if there’s a second, evil, mongoloid ALF that kills redneck hunters and teenage musicians with a lethal karate chop to the liver? The result is a kiddy horror movie mishmash that can best be summed up with two simple words: “It stinks!”

“Hear the Engines Roll” is the nearly unintelligible song performed by the untalented members of this ill-fated band; a song so bad even the lead singer is first to declare immediately after a record session that “It stinks!”

I present “Hear the Engines Roll” now to you in two versions: as it originally appears in the motion picture more famously known as Pod People and as it was reinterpreted by the cast of “Mystery Science Theater 3000”. Either way, “It stinks!”