Wavelength (1983) Extraterrestrial Alien Whale Children

Down on his luck musician Bobby Sinclair (Robert Carradine) drowns his sorrows at a LA bar and meets oddball girl Iris Longacre (Cherie Currie) who likes to narrate the scene in the style of a 40’s private-eye monologue.

Iris Longacre – “My problem is I can spot tormented souls at a distance of about 500 yards… I got, I guess you could say, I got a sense for somethings.”

Well Iris uses those special senses of hers when she stays at Bobby’s place high up on Mount Lee, right next to the Hollywood sign. She awakes to a wailing, pained, high pitched sounds, similar to that of whales. At the bottom of the garden is a giant secure factory unit, this is where the sounds are emitting from. Grabbing their coats they go investigating. Luckily neighbour Dan (Keenan Wynn) a kind of prospector hobo with a shotgun digging for gold under the Hollywood sign, tells them it’s a bunker filled with tunnels down there and shows them the way in.

Inside the rabbit warren of tunnels the “whale” noises get louder and more frantic, with only poor Iris who can hear them. Freaking out, they are discovered and brought into the belly of the bunker, slowly finding out the army are carrying out top secret experiments on a group of bald childlike aliens they had captured.

Can this hapless twosome help these outer worldly visitors escape the heavily fortified secret bunker or are all of their fates sealed inside the deep concrete structure? Well if you can get past the cheese, especially at the beginning, you can find out for yourself as it’s on YouTube in full at time of writing.

Random Wolfie Observations

• Throw in some religious icons, two Native Americans and a heap of really inappropriate gags! Bonfire talk “Why do they still have mouths if they don’t eat or talk?” “Well for sex I guess!” as everyone belly laughs out loud!!

“We can’t go running around with three naked kids, not even in Hollywood!”

• Never have I seen so many microphone booms poking at the top of the screen, every other scene one appears. It’s quite endearing to be honest.

• Director Mike Gray’s only feature film but he wrote the story for the Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon thriller classic The China Syndrome. Plus being a cinematographer on a list of documentary films, you can feel his inspiration in the camera work which has an unique doc style to it at times.
• Now sometimes when you have a little look on Google about a film you can find yourself dropping down the rabbit hole much like young Alice. This happened here on The Secret Sun Highly Strange Cinema page I stumbled across. Its an excellent  bonkers fun read and goes right off on one.
• One of the best things for me was the electronic soundtrack from German band Tangerine Dream. The instrumental ambient electronica suits this low budget science fiction tale perfectly. Always nice to pick it off the record shelve whenever an alien friend might pop on by.

Yeah this film might be a whole piece of cheese but you know what, even with the low budget, they all play their parts extremely well and it moves along at a great pace. It might not be ET but it’s an excellent fun piece of science-fiction to keep you entertained.

Let me know if you’ve seen it or get to see it. Anyhow thanks for reading and keep looking in the skies, you never know what you may find.

Mikey The Wolfman

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