It’s hard to say that the 1986 movie Invaders from Mars is a hidden sci-fi classic. But when you look at the film’s pedigree, it’s tempting to say something that hyperbolic. With VFX from John Dykstra (Star Wars), and a story co-written by Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star, Alien), this vintage remake has a lot going for it on paper. But is Invaders from Mars actually worth rewatching?
40 years ago today, this remake of the 1953 alien-invasion film of the same name opened in theaters and completely failed to connect with a wider audience. The film only earned about $4 million against a budget of $7 million. For context, the same studio, Cannon Films, had a much bigger flop the next year with Masters of the Universe, which only made $17 million against $22 million. With that in mind, Invaders from Mars feels more like a footnote than an outright catastrophe.
Today, the best reason to watch the film isn’t O’Bannon’s writing or Dykstra’s effects wizardry. Instead, it’s all about revisiting the performance of an all-time great actress, one many sci-fi fans have probably forgotten or never knew about in the first place: Louise Fletcher as Mrs. McKeltch, a teacher being controlled by aliens.
For fans of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Fletcher is likely best known as Kai Winn, the opportunistic religious leader from the planet Bajor, who modern fans have retroactively dubbed Space Karen. Her career exploded after the release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, in which she played the wicked Nurse Ratched. McKeltch is somewhere between the evilness of Kai Winn and the deplorable Ratched; she doesn’t want to be evil, but the invading aliens have other ideas for her.
The plot of Invaders from Mars is fairly straightforward: a young boy named David (Hunter Carson) is pretty sure that several people in his town are being controlled by an alien spacecraft that’s landed nearby, and although almost no one believes him, he seems to be 100 percent correct. That David is the focus of the narrative is the movie’s weakness, but if you were really high and it was very late at night, you might squint and think certain scenes from this movie inspired Terminator 2. And instead of the T-1000 coming after a kid, Invaders from Mars has Mrs. McKeltch.
Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975.
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Fletcher’s ability to play a totally unhinged character, who, yes, we would now call a Karen, is what the late actress is best remembered for. And Invaders from Mars gives her the opportunity to go full Karen in a horror-movie way rather than the psychological chills of Cuckoo’s Nest, or the complex sci-fi geopolitics of Deep Space Nine. She’s terrifying, and what makes her scary is the realism of her behavior. We can all imagine a Louise Fletcher type in our own lives, which is why her turn in Invaders from Mars is such a fantastic example of why she was a wonderful actress.
Fletcher doesn’t fully fix the clunkiness of Invaders from Mars, which is inferior to its 1953 progenitor if only because it feels more cynical. But if you’re serious about fully understanding what makes certain genre characters work, revisiting the work of an underrated master like Louise Fletcher in Invaders from Mars will make your sci-fi education more robust and weirder than ever before.
Invaders from Mars (1986) streams on Tubi.Learn Something New Every Day