The Day It Came to Earth (1977) is one of those movies that gives “so bad it’s good” a whole new meaning. Directed by Harry Thomason and written by Paul Fisk, it’s a cinematic masterpiece for all the wrong reasons. This film, made with the aesthetic charm of a high school science project, blends the excitement of a 1950s B-movie with the substance of a soggy potato chip. It stars Wink Roberts, Roger Manning, Delight De Bruine, and a very young Rita Wilson before she became a household name in better movies. It also features George Gobel, possibly wondering how he ended up here.
Plot? What Plot?
The film kicks off with the subtlety of a rockslide, as an alien arrives on Earth in a meteorite. The meteor crashes into a pond, where a couple of local mobsters have unceremoniously dumped their latest victim. At this point, you might be thinking, “Wow, that sounds like an interesting setup!” Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. What follows is a series of events that are more incoherent than a 3 a.m. infomercial for potato peelers.
The meteorite reanimates the body of the murdered man, transforming him into what can only be described as a half-baked Halloween costume. This is the film’s “alien creature,” which doesn’t so much “come to Earth” as it does stumble around aimlessly like someone who’s just woken up from a nap in the sun. The local college kids—who are somehow both the sharpest and most gullible teens in cinema history—witness the alien’s antics but, naturally, no one believes them. This is pretty much the entire film: “Hey, there’s an alien!” followed by “Shut up, you’re crazy!” What a plot.
The Alien
Let’s talk about the alien, shall we? It’s more “man in a rubber suit” than “alien lifeform,” and frankly, it looks like a rejected character design for a low-budget horror TV show from the ’70s. When you picture an alien in your mind, you might imagine something sleek, menacing, or at least vaguely intelligent. The Day It Came to Earth alien, on the other hand, looks like an angry pile of rubber who just wanted a good place to crash after a long flight from the stars. If this alien were to apply for a job, it would be the kind that you immediately regret hiring and then fire by email after one shift.
The creature itself has no real motivation except for one thing: it’s angry and confused, which is a lot like the audience watching the movie. It can’t communicate, doesn’t know what it’s doing, and seems content with wandering around and occasionally scaring the living daylights out of the locals. There are no grand plans for world domination or even basic survival. It’s just like a toddler let loose with a pack of crayons, scribbling wildly with no concern for consequences.
The College Kids Who Are Really Bad At Surviving
Next up, we have the college kids. Eddie Newton (Wink Roberts) and Ronnie McGuire (Roger Manning) are your typical ’70s teen movie characters: clueless, annoying, and somehow always around when something stupid happens. These characters were clearly written to represent every horror movie trope, and they do so with gusto. Eddie is the “brave one” who seems to think that just because he has a car and a college degree, he’s qualified to lead a bunch of panicked teens through a murder mystery. Spoiler alert: he’s not.
Ronnie, on the other hand, is the type of character who seems to exist purely to yell “What the hell is going on?” every five minutes. He’s the equivalent of the friend you have who, whenever something odd happens, turns to you and says, “Is this real life?” while you’re watching a bad movie. These are your protagonists, folks—two guys who could’ve easily been in an episode of Scooby-Doo.
Then there’s Sally Baxter (Delight De Bruine), the inevitable love interest who is given little to do except to look shocked and scream. She’s basically there to be the damsel in distress, though her distress is primarily from the filmmakers’ inability to give her anything interesting to do. Her role is about as fulfilling as a glass of tap water at a fancy restaurant.
Horror or Comedy?
The most perplexing thing about The Day It Came to Earth is its utter lack of self-awareness. Is this meant to be a horror film? A comedy? A cautionary tale about why you should never trust your local filmmakers with an alien script? The movie seems to wander between these genres aimlessly, as if it were unsure of what kind of monster it wanted to be. The creature is terrifying if you’ve never seen a horror movie in your life, but if you’ve watched The Blob, The Thing, or any other movie that tries to create suspense, you’ll quickly realize that this alien isn’t even trying. It might be the first movie to feature an alien that actively makes you yawn rather than scream.
The acting does little to help either. Richard Jaeckel’s portrayal of the befuddled townsfolk and the teens’ attempts to solve the mystery is so wooden it makes the set pieces look like real trees. The most passionate moment of the film happens when the creature finally breaks out into full view, and the filmmakers set the camera in a corner, pointed at a man wearing a rubber mask who stumbles around for a minute. Truly, The Day It Came to Earth is the horror equivalent of a dad trying to play on his kids’ video game. He might be in the room, but he’s completely missing the point.
What’s the Point of This Movie?
The Day It Came to Earth suffers from an identity crisis so severe that it feels like the filmmakers were drunk when they came up with the script. The plot is so thin that you could use it as a coaster for your drink, and the characters are so shallow that you’d think they were actively trying to drown in their own idiocy. The alien’s motives are a mystery (not that it matters), and the teenagers are too busy looking at their watches to realize that time itself is the least important thing in this narrative. It’s almost as if they were told, “Just do whatever, we’ll fix it in post-production,” and then no one ever bothered to look at it again.
In the end, The Day It Came to Earth manages to confuse and bore, with no real scares or laughs. It’s a love letter to the time when movies didn’t have to make sense, as long as there was an alien, some gore, and a town full of screaming idiots.
And if you ever find yourself watching this film—congratulations. You’ve just entered a bizarre, inexplicable world where the only thing that makes sense is how badly it all went wrong.
The Day It Came to Earth isn’t so much a “must-see” as it is a “must-avoid,” but if you’re looking for something to put on in the background while you prepare dinner, you might just find this monstrosity oddly captivating. Just make sure to have a couple of drinks on hand, because you’ll need them to cope with the sheer absurdity of it all.
