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As we celebrate the 66th year of the Roswell Incident and the 33rd year since the movie’s release (there’s your numerological significance), we can take a closer look at a documentary that claimed in its TV posters to ‘Reveal the Truth about UFOs.’ That claim seemed a little shaky off the bat, especially considering morning television, game show, and Miss America’s emcee, Gary Collins was a part of the movie. The shots of the shuttle of the space too were a bit confusing since its first launch didn’t occur yet.
Aside from the awful Gary Collins, the assertion didn’t come as a shock because the people of Sunn Classics Films were the ones that produced Hangar 18 and they were also behind the release of sort of documentaries on Bigfoot, ancient aliens, the Bermuda Triangle, and life after death since the 70s. (To be frank, I have no idea what I would have possibly done in that era had it not been for Sunn Classics. Most likely more school work. Or if not that, at the very least I would have nurtured a much more refined version of myself.) Director James Conway was already a veteran at Sunn by 1980. So were three of the four writers of the picture. So this was a team that knew how to repurpose the weak evidence of the bizarre into unarguable truth.
Regardless of it’s predecessor, this one is a rather straightforward conspiracy science fiction feature (the first attempt by Sunn) and is much closer to The Capricorn One from a couple of years ago than it is to Mysterious Monsters and Beyond and Back. With the same formula as a thriller centered around a hoaxed lunar exodus, this uses a popular conspiracy The Roswell Incident of 1947, and the whisper surrounding the newly introduced Area 51, This too takes the disguise of thickly patting sci-fi detailing over it. The fear of getting the government reprised is always overhead though.
The title begins with a caution and logic disclaimer, which is followed by the Sunn crawl sequence, where they claim everything witnessed is based on reality, and every story has to begin from a certain point. When asked how the movie goes, it is necessary for it to be something not just interesting but entirely unbelievable. It is indeed impressive how they ignore blaming them for trying.
To kick things off, we are presented with the retrofuturistic credits combined with a bombastic soundtrack that leads us into one of the shuttles in orbit. One of the three crew members is hand-launching a military satellite which puts him in the open payload of the shuttle. It seems the modern idea of punishment, while such a thing exists, is somewhat more polite and gentle. Which happens to be the location of my yesteryear folly. Out of nowhere an alien flying saucer speeds in, colliding with the poor astronaut while smashing the drone satelite to pieces. The rest is history, or rather, the future.
The rest is history, but not without a cinematic first. While Kubrick gift-wrapped the idea of an astronaut corpse aimlessly floating in space, Conway offers something much more entertaining. Picture a spaceship wondering the stars, with its windshield adorned with a decapitated corpse haloing around it. Instead of opting for the high ground, and attempting to in all sincerity retrieve the body from the dull void of nothing, the rest of the crew members decide to leave the deceased, headless, astronaut lost in nothingness forever. Quite a bold decision, as one would call it. Steven Bancroft and Lou Collins, alongside James Hampton, are feeling adventurous today with their big choices.
Having set the context, let us finally turn our attention to Roswell. The unnaturally gigantic UFO, after colliding with the satellite, glides to a tranquil landing close to a rather abandoned town in Arizona. When Marcel gave an account to the press in 1947 about what the Air Force had uncovered, he was promptly discredited. Now, before Bancroft and Price even begin their account, they are elaborately smeared in the newspapers and all the evidence has seemingly been wiped away. The telemetry tapes where the collision was showcased during the early 80s were deleted, and as expected, the UFO, despite its stature, is claimed to have been taken by the government and military to a hidden base within the Texan desert. There, scientists in charge, including Darren McGavin who serves as NASA’s deputy director, begin to poke at it with sticks.
Interestingly, Bancroft and Price ( I can’t wrap my head around how these two clowns ever got through the shuttle program. I’ve met real astronauts.) here are totally unchecked and infiltrating controlled areas. The President’s Chief of Staff Robert Vaughn ( portrayed in the traditionally grim role as “Robert Vaughn”) hires a particularly unsubtle group of agents to gag the prying eavesdroppers as he is, on the contrary, trying very hard to suppress the story to protect the upcoming elections. In a nutshell, the more the film advances its plot, the more it begins to look like Capricorn One, up to and including a point when our heroes find out that someone has cut off the brakes on their car.
(Without revealing too much, it’s important to remark that Bankcroft left Price after he died right in the center of the highway, the same way he abandoned that headless individual in space. Did Price simply float there like the rest of these astronauts?)
The “searching for truth” narrative, though intriguing, pales in comparison to the “asshole astronaut” element. However, this is only partially true because the investigation happening at Hangar 18 is always fascinating. Granted, the effects showcase the style of the independent science fiction films made in the early 80s, but they do play around with some captivating concepts, and the ship’s design is quite unique. In fact, the alien symbols onboard closely resemble the markings that were found in the original Roswell wreckage.
However, the revelation begins when the cat-and-mouse game becomes an investigation as we finally get some screen time from the great Darren McGavin, who, single-handedly saved this movie from being a complete failure. There is just something about him. He was in the business for some fifty years, and always played a Mike Hammer-type character. In the 50s TV series, or as the father in ‘A Christmas Story’, he always had the same mannerisms, the same nervous voice, and the same gestures. But dammit, I cannot see him here without seeing Carl Kolchak. He sure is funny when he tries to emote though. It is just a shame he was teamed up with Gary Collins who is not even a decent game show host.
With the primary conspiracy and Capricorn One, references made earlier are relatively apparent. Close Encounters of the Third Kind comes into mind as well as some episodes of The Twilight Zone. In there, some jokes are made in the style of the Night Stalker. They also pull in ancient aliens and The Outer Space Connection, a documentary from 1975 made by Sunn Classics. And we can’t forget to mention Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and The Pit reference. Still, considering the references that came before it, it is remarkable to pay attention to all the other things it predicted and changed in the future, including The X-Files (Hangar 18’s thumbprint is definitely on Chris Carter’s forehead), Fox’s Alien Autopsy special (which would have been distributed by Sunn a quarter century earlier), and the application of military drone aircraft.
Despite the fact that Hanger 18 puts in a great deal of effort to build its story by incorporating intentional similarities and intertwining the numerous elements, it remains far too superficial. It’s a bit wider, lacks depth, and the characters are completely uninspiring. The target audience is also evident. However, if you’re hoping for something revelatory about UFOs, then I’m not as confident, but there was a degree of success in creating intrigue around Area 51.
As far as the Roswell incident is concerned, I am leaning toward the more recent claim that the Soviet Union staged a propaganda hoax in 1946. After all, there is no doubt that Stalin was immersed in creating mass panic in the United States and, drawing inspiration from Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, had his scientists work on a new type of aircraft. These scientists were then attached to the Nazi engineers that the Soviets abducted after the war. The aircraft was unlike anything else around it didn’t look or function like anything else. It was piloted by a couple of deformed midget gunners and was shot over New Mexico, with the intention of convincing some of the local yokels that Martians were invading. I’m willing to bet it was never intended to be a crash. Fortunately, they did manage to get a stealth bomber out of the deal. In my opinion, that mythology is a thousand times better than the ordinary alien with a broken spaceship story.
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