Written, Directed, and Special Effects Designed by John Coats
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“I’m going to the other side of the island.”
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Review by William D. Tucker.
UFOs. Flying saucers. People see ‘em. People wonder what they are, and why they’re so mysterious, always flitting about, teasing us, never quite letting us see the goods. All the photographs and video footage are indistinct, blurry anticlimaxes-if not total damn hoaxes. Some people write books about ‘em trying to explain what they are, how they came to be-and they end up making some wildass claims about the saucers and their presumed occupants. Abductions. Anal probes. Harvesting human sperm and eggs to mix ‘em with extraterrestrial sperm and eggs to cook up some alien-human hybrid omelets. Perverse conspiracies involving government/x-tro collaboration. This is stuff people claim is true! Not a shred of actual evidence, and yet people concoct entire cosmologies around a whole array of interstellar creatures. You have people writing extravagantly paranoid science fiction sagas but they’re published as non-fiction. Some marketing genius must’ve realized right quick that these alien abduction stories moved more units if you sold them as “shocking true stories.” What a fuckin’ racket, right?
As a kid, I used to believe all this stuff was true. Like, y’know, when I was K thru Fifth Grade, elementary school. I spent hours and hours watching TV shows that presented themselves as nonfiction narrative recreations of horrifying alien invasion scenarios of the most gruesomely intimate kind: people kidnapped out of their beds by strange entities that could walk through walls; alien mind control powers that could corrupt your perceptions by implanting screen memories; women forcibly impregnated with alien fetuses and nonconsensual medical exams that could be described as a system of organized high-tech rape-and when I asked my parents about this stuff they just kind of shrugged it off, didn’t seem to have much to say about it one way or another. I started to think that my parents were in denial because they couldn’t acknowledge their powerlessness before these alien masterminds. Of course, I grew out of all this by the time I hit middle school. Around that time I got into serial killers, gangsters, and world-ending diseases, so all that UFO stuff seemed less urgent. The X-Files came along and kinda gave the game away with its overstuffed mega-conspiracy style of plots which made all the paranormal/crackpot stuff seem like plug’n’play narrative gimmicks similar to assembling a tabletop role playing adventure from a Monster Manual. Mulder and Scully would encounter one reality shattering horror after another-and Scully still wouldn’t get it. The true conspiracy seemed to be a plot by Chris Carter to make Mulder look right all the time at Scully’s expense. By the time I got to the end of high school I was pretty much an atheist.
Which brings me to the 1977 movie Foes, a film that benefits greatly from not trying to over-explain itself. Foes is about a flying saucer that harasses a quartet of people on a small island that’s home to a lighthouse. We get some exposition laden scenes of clueless military officials whose equipment is all being malfunctioned by an energy field projected by the flying saucer. The occupants of the saucer zap the humans with strange energy beams that pick them up off the ground and/or cause them to catch fire. You ever burn ants with the sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass? Well, now we’re the ants. Eventually, we see creepy lights come out of the saucer that may or may not be living beings. Much of the running time is taken up by nondescript humans overcome with a nameless sense of dread to be in the presence of the opaque and ominous saucer. Nothing is explained. We’re never told who or what the saucer and its accompanying lights are supposed to be, nor are we reassured that the government has any secret answers. You watch what happens, and then you have to make up your own mind.
Foes didn’t scare me here in this year of 2026, but I found it utterly fascinating to watch. It doesn’t back down from being creepy and mysterious. Sure, the special effects are obviously special effects, but they’re also precise and evocative. Foes is absolutely committed to preserving the mysterious and the inexplicable without any trace of romance or sentiment. Something from beyond takes an interest in us, and we may have to accept the fact that it will always be incomprehensible to us.
Of course . . . we may also be beyond the understanding of the saucer beings . . .
You ever got the ants' side of the story before you burned ‘em on a whim?
Probably not . . .
