MOVIE REVIEW : A NEW AND IMPROVED ‘INVADERS’

Tobe Hooper’s remake of “Invaders From Mars” (citywide Friday) is set in a small California/Midwestern-looking town: Anywhere, U.S.A. There, Mom, Dad and little David Gardner--as homey a trio as you’ll ever meet--gaze up into the night. But the sky shakes oddly. (Are those real constellations--or part of the ceiling from the local Starlite Lounge? Or is somebody moving a matte sheet?)

Some weird, inexplicable something is about to descend into the sand pit out back. Mom and Dad will disappear past the hill and picket fence, then come back with strange, vacant expressions--and screws in the back of their necks. Investigating police are going to prowl around, get sucked into the pits and turn up later with the same scarred necks and vacant stares. Soon, no matter where David runs, he’s going to find people with screws in their necks, gazing at him oddly--his classmates, his teacher, strangers on the street.

It’s a nightmare, obviously--and a peculiarly 1950s sort at that. When director-designer William Cameron Menzies made the 1953 “Invaders From Mars,” he and screenwriter Richard Blake were serving up standard Cold War-era chills with a Gothic twist. Menzies’ youthful idols were the German UFA studio expressionists, and he may have seized on this material as a kind of kitsch “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”: David wandering through bizarre, angled sets, full of authority figures who act like the False Maria in “Metropolis.”

Hooper remakes the movie faithfully. He doesn’t really try to update or refashion it, like Philip Kaufman with “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or John Carpenter with “The Thing.” He simply does the movie over again--with a vaster budget, a modern perspective and a lot of reflexive inside humor. (Examples: The Gardners live in the same house they did in 1953, but it’s now in Santa Mira, site of Don Siegel’s similarly themed “Body Snatchers”; a “Body Snatchers” pod lies with some junk in a basement; David goes to Menzies Public School, and Hooper’s police chief is played by Jimmy Hunt, who was David in the 1953 original.) Hooper is trying to make a more self-referential, self-conscious version of “Invaders”--his ideal version.

But his treatment is lusher. He can realize everything the 1953 movie makers had to leave out--letting John Dykstra create a trickier spaceship, and the designers provide tastier aliens. Menzies’ Martians looked like two wrestlers in green, velour jump suits, ordered around by a silver-painted, tentacled head in a fishbowl. (That same head turns up here in the school basement, along with the pod.) Hooper’s E.T.-types look like four-legged, leering globs of melting ice cream, and they truck around funkily, as if R. Crumb were animating them.

In the original, the acting was incredibly bad: When the characters turned into zombies, you could barely tell the difference--except for their blank scowls. Here, the actors are trying deliberately to overplay. Karen Black is sitcom-mommish as the nurse/heroine; Timothy Bottoms and Laraine Newman give the elder Gardners a cult-victim vacuity. (In 1953, at the height of the Red scare, the “possessed” parents were surlier, more like terrorists.)

James Karen has a field day as a macho Marine general, and Louise Fletcher amusingly parodies Nurse Ratched as an evil schoolteacher. In “Lifeforce,” Hooper was accused of having no sense of humor, and here he seems to be designing the movie to contain the audience reactions beforehand; kidding himself before anyone else has a chance.

The humor is there. Co-scenarist Dan O’Bannon uses the deadpan grotesquerie he had in “Return of the Living Dead.” (How can any one think a movie with lines like “Marines have no qualms about killing Martians!” isn’t intended to be funny?)

You can sympathize with the people who think “Invaders From Mars” is a botch; there’s something so anachronistic and out-of-scale about it, the reductio ad absurdum of overblown ‘80s movie making. But they’re missing something. If you can tap into Hooper’s oddball rhythms and cold sendups, you can enjoy yourself.

And, though the 1953 “Invaders” was an effective movie, it’s not really the classic that people remember. Except for Menzies’ superb production designs, everything in the remake is better: the acting, the camera work, definitely the Martians. It may not grip audiences in the same way, but that’s because Hooper is trying something harder, a conscious campiness that’s tough to bring off.

There are times in “Invaders” when the actors lose control of the style (Black and Fletcher never do, but Hunter Carson, as David, has so many startled reaction shots, he often looks like a bug-eyed monster himself). But when Hooper and his collaborators get the languorously empty, paranoid ‘50s feel they want, this film verges on being hysterically funny. Humor in the movies is hard to come by these days; it’s best not to quarrel about whether it’s intended or not.

‘INVADERS FROM MARS’ A Cannon Group Inc. presentation of a Golan-Globus production. Producers Menaham Golan, Yoram Globus. Director Tobe Hooper. Script Dan O’Bannon, Don Jakoby. Camera Daniel Pearl. Production design Leslie Dilley. Music Christopher Young. Associate producers Edward L. Alperson Jr., Wade H. Williams III. With Karen Black, Hunter Carson, Timothy Bottoms, Laraine Newman, James Karen, Bud Cort, Louise Fletcher.

Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children).