Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America

A scattershot onslaught of montaged found-footage, Baldwin's film starts off in strident '50s sci-fi fashion as an apocalyptic 'TRUE STORY!!'. Crazed energy-sucking vampires from the planet Quetzalcoatl arrive on Earth, mutant zombies stalk America, and Godzilla looms in all his rubbery glory over Manhattan. As the pace hots up, subliminal snippets of political information flash up on screen, and incongruous elements emerge from the sprawling paranoid narrative. JFK, UFOs, the Bay of Pigs and the Bermuda Triangle all take their place in a relentlessly incoherent babble about the alien menace that conspires to eat away at the very fabric of reality - reality Pentagon-style, that is. Using the language of '50s Cold War paranoia to account for the United States' murky intervention in world events, this brilliantly ironic ideological deconstruction invites us to imagine a world-view in which Third World politicians are fiends from hell, and in which Kissinger, Pinochet, Klaus Barbie and Contra goons are fearless vampire-fighters. This is dazzling, audacious political graffiti, like an unimaginable collaboration between Noam Chomsky and Edward D Wood Jr.