The Monitors, benevolent aliens in overcoats and bowler hats, have taken control of human society, enforcing peaceful compliance with spray-cans of pacifist gas, and rendering our leaders and military useless and redundant. Unaccepting of paradisiac totalitarianism, agents of SCRAG ("Secret Counter RetAlitorial Group") fight to free mankind from this benign yoke. Produced by Chicago's famous 'Second City' comedy company, the film satirises media-messaging, the military, and human contrariness in a heavy-handed, but not overly successful way. The comedy swings wildly from the clever (the POTUS (Ed Begley) passing his time doing crosswords while waiting for the people to return him to power) to the farcical (that old standard of juvenile entertainment: a food fight) with a lot of time devoted to stale sight-gags. There are some odd moments, such as when Harry's thoughts are visualised as a montage (including momentary shots of a topless woman in a cemetery taken from Ed Wood Jr.'s 'Orgy of the Dead' (1964)). Guy Stockwell and Susan Oliver are fine as the 'straight' leads, but are secondary to comics Larry Storch (familiar to boomers as the fast talking Corporal Agarn on 'F-Troop' (1965)) and mustachioed Avery Schreiber (of 'Burns and Schreiber' fame). While definitely a product of the 1960s, the film has limited 'psychedelic' imagery or overt drug references, and (mercifully) no hippies. Back-dropped against Chicago, the look of the Monitors (sort of M. I. B. Meets René Magritte) is a bit surreal, although other than their menacing omnipresence, the aliens would not look out of place in London's business district. The film has a few fun moments, some good cameos, and the variations of the Monitor's oft-heard 'musical message' are amusing, but generally is uninteresting, either as entertainment or as a historical oddity (despite being a progenitor to John Carpenter's more kinetic paranoid opus 'They Live' (1988) and an early example of the 'fake commercial' gimmick that Paul Verhoeven played with in 'Robocop' (1987)).
Review of The Monitors
