As announced last week, each Tuesday in June FANGORIA will be presenting Terror Tuesdays on the streaming service Pluto TV, a triple feature of horror films personally selected by a member of the Fango fam. Each week, one of us will curate three titles with a theme of some sort, and the party starts every Tuesday night at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific on the Pluto TV Terror channel. It’s all free!
This week we dive into some otherworldly features involving aliens. How timely! But unlike that lackluster whistleblower interview, we are bringing the goods.
First up, we are kicking things off with The McPherson Tape, aka UFO Abduction, aka Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. A decade before The Blair Witch Project ignited a found footage phenomenon, there was The McPherson Tape. Shot on VHS and edited on tape, first-time filmmaker Dean Alito chronicles the McPherson family as they gather for a birthday party interrupted by aliens. The effects are very dated and low-rent, but that’s the charm of this little movie. Fun fact: UFO enthusiasts believe this movie contains actual footage of aliens because it was featured on the ’90s TV series Encounters.
Next, we will double down on some Tobe Hooper alien fare and jump into the 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars as a boy tries to stop an alien invasion while the adults in his town are mind-controlled by the extraterrestrial menace. This one is a fun gateway horror movie for kids, packed with makeup FX by Stan Winston (Pumpkinhead) and visual effects by John Dykstra (Star Wars). Hooper also teams back up with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre cinematographer Daniel Pearl.
Closing out tonight’s triple feature is Tobe Hooper’s erotic sci-fi horror Lifeforce. Do you like aliens and vampires? Good news, you get alien vampires in this film — also, a bunch of nudity. But most importantly, you get some very rad FX. Lifeforce is very strange and ridiculous, but I dare you not to enjoy the hell out of it. It’s got everything you could want in an alien horror movie, and god bless Tobe Hooper for making it.
Oh, and fun fact: Dan O’Bannon (Alien, The Return of the Living Dead) was a writer on tonight’s second and third features.
Tune in tonight at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific on the Pluto TV Terror channel. And join us next week for another installment of FANGORIA’s Terror Tuesday.
