THE BUBBLE (3D -

I bought recently bought this DVD after having it on my "need to see" list ever since I was a little kid. I remember seeing ads for it back in the 1970s under the alternate (and more exciting) title THE FANTASTIC INVASION OF PLANET EARTH . . . in "Spacevision" (3-D).

The DVD comes with 2 pairs of blue / red 3-D glasses (although, I believe the theatrical release used gray polarized 3-D glasses, which won't work on a television screen). They tried this same stunt a few years ago with COMIN' AT YA! I bought that movie, too, and the 3-D is mostly blurry and hard to watch because it was in "fake" blue / red 3-D.

The 3-D effects in THE BUBBLE are a lot better than in the COMIN' AT YA! DVD, but they range from "clear and excellent" to "blurry and bad." But, overall, the DVD is very watchable.

The movie is sort of like a TWILIGHT ZONE or OUTER LIMITS episode. Two men and a pregnant woman flying in a small, private plane need to make an emergency landing when the woman goes into labor. They end up in a town that looks like a movie studio back lot where the citizens walk around like they are in a trance repeating the same lines over and over again. After the woman (Deborah Walley, who also starred in GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN) has her baby, they decide to leave the town, but discover that a transparent, impenetrable dome has them trapped inside! They believe that aliens placed the dome over the town in order to study the inhabitants! They think that the plane flew under the dome when it was opened briefly "like a fly getting under a cake cover."

They spend the rest of the movie trying to find a way out. They decide to dig a tunnel under the dome and crawl out! I WON'T REVEAL THE ENDING, BUT IT'S A HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT! (Which is a shame, because the concept and execution are fairly interesting for much of the movie, but the ending is a let-down).

Another cheese classic from the dusty vaults of the Burgomaster.