Three men are in the woods poaching during a storm.  Nearby, a ship from outer space crash lands.  One of the poachers sees it.  He takes their truck and investigates.  Inside the ship he finds what looks like eggs.  He begins smashing them when an adult alien kills him.

Not far away, the crash is also seen by a young boy named Tommy (Oscar Martin).  The next day he is out looking for insect specimens when he also finds the ship.  Inside is one un-smashed egg. He takes it home.

At the same time a rock group decides to go on a camping trip in the same area where the ship came down.  The group is comprised of Rick (Ian Sera), Sharon (Nina Ferrer), Tracy (Maria Albert), Brian (Emilio Linder), Kathy (Sara Palmer), and a groupie named Lara (Susana Bequer).  Lara is after Rick, who also happens to be Sharon’s boyfriend.  

Out in the woods Lara says something that sets Sharon off.  She tosses a cup of water in Lara’s face.  Lara runs off and ends up running into the two remaining poachers.  One of them tries to assault her.  She gets away but then runs into an alien.  The alien kills her, and she falls off a cliff.  The others find her and try to take her to get help.  They end up at Tommy’s house where they meet his mother Molly (Concha Cuetos) and crabby Uncle Bill (Manuel Pereiro). Everyone ends up stuck at the house since the phones are down and a rock fall blocked the road.  

In the meantime, Tommy’s egg hatches a trumpet nosed alien.  He calls it Trumpy and makes friends with it.  As Tommy and Trumpy are bonding the adult alien from the spaceship is running around the woods killing everyone it comes across. 

“Extra Terrestrial Visitors” AKA “Los nuevos extraterrestres” AKA Pod People” was released in 1983 and was directed by Juan Piquer Simon.  It is a French-Spanish science fiction film.

The original script for the film was as a regular science fiction horror movie.  In it an alien from outer space goes on a rampage killing people.  In 1982 Steven Spielberg released “ET: The Extraterrestrial”.  To cash in on ET’s success the producers demanded changes to the film to incorporate a subplot similar to Spielberg’s film.  This brought about Tommy and the questionably adorable Trumpy.

Even if the original script had been kept, I doubt that the movie would have been all that scary, or even any good.  The titular monster looks like a cross between a gorilla and an elephant, perhaps even an aardvark or an anteater.  I like a stupid monster but this one looks like it came from a cartoon.  In addition, the rock band members are annoying and petty.

At some point Film Ventures International repackaged the film for distribution, releasing it as “Pod People”.  In it they used footage from the 1985 Don Dohler film “Galaxy Invader” as background for the opening credits of the film.  This was done without the permission of Dohler.  In 1991 the “Pod People” version of the film was lampooned by the people that bring you Mystery Science Theater 3000.       

Extra Terrestrial Visitors

Pod People-MST3K version

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