Talky, ponderous sci-fi is about twenty-minutes overspent in my opinion, and while it does a fair job in painting the isolation of a remote band of people discovering the human race may have become extinct in the wake of an alien invasion, it does little to fulfil the promise when action is needed.Director Rebane has a solid concept, and his cast of amateurs do a creditable job (notably Bentzen and Holt) with a heavy emphasis on dialogue and building a sense of intrigue out of a flickering red light and interference on a ham radio. The landscape is attractive and while there are a couple of moments where the pace gets above ambling, it's an effort to reach the climax (which while unexpected, doesn't redeem the previous 95 minutes of hard-talking labour).One of those films that promises much in its narrative build-up, dangling the juicy plot carrots, displaying an attractive ambition that is ultimately never realised; and when you discover that it was never on the negative and certainly never on the page, you become (understandably) quite aggrieved that you invested almost two hours of your precious life for such a blatant ruse. I wanted "They" to live up to its potential, and disappointingly, though it's picturesque and moody, it doesn't come to fruition.

Strange gas erupts from the earth and mysterious red lights appear out of nowhere, causing the world's population to slowly die off as this unknown menace moves from the North & South Poles toward the equator. The main part of the story focuses on 5 folks in the woods and how they deal with the situation. How? By talking...and talking...and talllllllking. Somehow one guy into UFOs lets everyone else know it is UFOs because, well, he is into UFOs and knows aliens from Mars moved into Earth's core 8,000 years ago. Good lord Rebane, what are you thinking? Even if this has a germ of a good idea, the execution is so terrible that nothing can be forgiven. Not even the cool, snowbound setting. I can take cheap any ol' day, but not cheap and boring. The only thing that kept me amused was that this uses the same theme from James Bryan's LADY STREET FIGHTER. Well, I was amused until I remembered that theme was stuck in my head for weeks after LSF and now it will be stuck again.

This low budget video snoozer is from the famous director, Ito, an inhabitant of Northern Wisconsin. It's starts out as some sort of winter in the wilderness movie. But things are going bad, occasional spurts over the radio talk about UFOs and diseases. The three guest of a backwood brother-sister duo, Jake and Kate, are scientists investigating...., what? We don't know, strange for a movie consisting of so much talk. We see a diseased man run across the runway, driving off Jake's bush plane. So he lands at a nearby lodge, laid up for the winter, but no gas there. While on the ground, another plane flies over-head, and in a stock sound effect and gasps, we learn that plain crashes. Two of the scientists are so blasé they would rather hang around the lodge and play with the ham radio than check out the crash and maybe save someone's life. There they see the mysterious red light, which is the aliens or something, besides a creepy echo effected radio voice asking leading questions which must be aliens.So we hear a lot of speculation about this plague, invasion. Occasionally they cut to a TV studio with some locals telling the audience about their UFO encounter. More creepiness, young lovers watching this late night 70's talk show dreck suddenly disappear, kazaam!! Topping off the random cuts from the stranded group is the invasion of Tomahawk by the aliens, meaning about 50 odd friends and family running amok on the streets through red smoke generated by smoke bombs with the towns old fire trucks and AMC Ambassador police car going here and there. For clinchers, there is a couple UFOs that are grade school art projects at best.Meanwhile, our team of four guys and the lady decline to three as one of the scientists steals the plane but crashes as the red light gets him. Then Jake, our outdoors man, tries to make it to town on the snow mobile but the red smoke bomb gets him cold. Finally, the remaining three trek back to town on foot, they are running out of food and there is no game to hunt. They get separated, one of them freezes, the last two get re-united, in a juvenile Adam and Eve motif that would make you wretch.This is definitely a Mystery Science Theater 3K film. There is no action or much of a plot and the cut away shots to the rest of the world just add to the confusion. In the last act, out in the cold around a limpid campfire, the wiseacre Scientist reveals the whole mystery concerning Martians burrowing under the earth. You see Mars and Earth were once next door neighbors so the Martians made it to earth, burrowed underground for millenia. So why now, why the plague? How did they get the saucers out of the ground? How did he derive the hypotheses, based on meager data he gleaned from the shortwave? Who knows?

How can one write a script and produce a movie without one entertaining moment. Film is supposed to be visual in nature and this has people sitting around talking the whole time. And it's no "My Dinner with Andre." Something is killing the people of earth. It's spreading. Some people, trapped in some pretty cold environs (Canada?) are left to try to figure it out. That's all they ever do. Try to figure it out. They have no plan. They have no vitality. The aliens never confront them, to speak of, and so we don't even know what's going on. The outdoorsy scientist has a theory, but it could just be a bunch of hooey. The conclusion is about as stupid as anything I've seen in years. How could someone get the money to put together such a snoozer. If you can't compete with the big boys, at least tell a decent story. As with so many of these, there are long treks through the snow and a snowmobile trip that goes for about ten minutes with nothing happening.