January 23, 2024

UFO Storage Wars: Hangar 18

Poster - Hangar 18 (1980)
Now Playing:
Hangar 18 (1980)


Pros: Leverages UFO and government conspiracy lore to concoct a reasonably decent sci-fi thriller; Notable performances by Robert Vaughn and Darren McGavin
Cons: Has the look and feel of a TV movie; Woefully inept alien spacecraft exterior

There’s been a lot of interesting news on the UFO/UAP front since we last checked in on UFO cinema here at Films From Beyond. 

Following up the release of eye-opening footage of U.S. military encounters with UFOs, an honest-to-goodness government whistleblower, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, has testified before Congress that the federal government maintains a secret alien craft recovery program, and that we’re in possession of the remains of crashed vehicles and the bodies of non-human occupants.

To make things even more interesting, at least one element of the federal bureaucracy, The Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General, found Grusch’s complaints credible, which paved the way for his going public.

The mainstream media’s general disinterest in this astounding story, and the various attempts to impugn Grusch’s character, makes me think there is really something there.

Of course, ever since the incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, tales of crashed spaceships and recovered alien pilots have occupied the outer edges of UFO lore and challenged investigators to come up with hard evidence.

Screenshot - Alleged Roswell alien autopsy footage, now debunked
Okay, so this isn't real, but the Truth, and real preserved alien bodies, are out there... maybe.

Some researchers, citing reports from military personnel involved in the incident, maintain that pieces of the Roswell spacecraft, along with the bodies of its occupants, were transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio, where they allegedly ended up in a top secret location, Hangar 18.

Not long after Steven Spielberg turned UFOs into box office gold with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the people at Sunn Classic Pictures decided to hop aboard the interstellar gravy train with a UFO epic of their own.

Sunn Classic, known at the time for cheesy Biblical and paranormal documentaries (more on that later), wisely leveraged Hangar 18’s notoriety for their film, but instead of making another documentary, they went the dramatic route, relocating the infamous hangar to a remote Air Force Base in Texas.

Hangar 18 tries to set up a documentary feel with an opening title card, but what follows is pure B drama (don't get me wrong, that's not a bad thing).

Screenshot - Beginning Hangar 18 title card that gives the impression that what follows is a documentary.

The film opens with a space shuttle mission that is preparing to launch a satellite out of the cargo bay. One astronaut is in the bay attending to last minute details, while two others, Bancroft (Gary Collins) and Price (James Hampton) are driving the spacecraft.

Right before the launch, instruments show a large, mysterious craft taking up station next to the space shuttle, and Bancroft confirms with Mission Control that they can see the strange object.

The satellite’s engines fire, sending it straight into the UFO, resulting in an enormous explosion that **GULP!** decapitates the astronaut doing the EVA. The surviving astronauts execute an emergency re-entry while Mission Control tries to figure out what happened.

Screenshot - Hangar 18 (1980), aftermath of the disastrous satellite launch
In space, no one can hear you lose your head.

Mission Control tracks the mystery object, which hasn’t been destroyed in the explosion and appears to be under intelligent control, to a landing site in the Arizona desert. The Air Force sends in a team to secure the area and whisk the craft to Hangar 18, which in Sunn Classic’s universe is located on a base in the middle of Nowhere, Texas.

At this point the film alternates between two plot lines. One features a conspiracy by Washington higher-ups to blame Bancroft and Price for the satellite disaster, while the astronauts in turn try to track down the recovered alien craft in order to clear their names. The other plot line dives into the minutia of ancient astronaut theories as a team of NASA experts examines the intact craft stored in the hangar.

The first storyline seems to have been inspired by Capricorn One (1977), in which an unscrupulous NASA administrator, fearing a budget-crippling mission failure, fakes a Mars landing for public consumption, but then must deal with the astronauts who, fearing for their lives, threaten to spill the beans.

Robert Vaughn plays Gordon Cain, an assistant to the President of the United States, who, in collaboration with the Air Force, is trying to cover up the existence of the recovered UFO. The President is a known UFO skeptic, and Cain figures that if word got out, somehow his boss’ re-election chances would be damaged (as if the government had no other reason to keep something like that secret).

Screenshot - Robert Vaughn in Hangar 18 (1980)
In the '70s, Napoleon Solo quit the spy game and got a Washington, D.C. desk job.

The Capricorn One vibe is strong in scenes where Bancroft and Price discover unaltered NASA telemetry data showing the presence of the UFO during the mission, and are shadowed by federal agents in black suits (Men in Black?) as they check out the Arizona crash site. As the astronauts get closer to discovering the recovered spacecraft’s location, the stakes get higher and they realize the fight is not only for the Truth, but for their very lives.

CAUTION: CAN YOU HANDLE THE SECRETS OF HANGAR 18?

Erich von Däniken and his best-selling book Chariots of the Gods? hover over the parallel storyline of the examination of the captured alien craft. NASA administrator Harry Forbes (Darren McGavin), is tasked by the Air Force to assemble a crack team to investigate the alien technology.

Unaware of the trouble Bancroft and Price are in, Forbes hops to it. The scene in which the scientists first set eyes on the craft is clearly meant to evoke a Close Encounters-type sense of awe and wonder, but unfortunately Hangar 18 only evokes wonderment that the filmmakers thought they could get away with such an uninspired design.

As Forbes and a couple of scientists in hazmat suits approach the thing, it looks like nothing more than a large, industrial grade HVAC unit with flashing lights at the base. Considering the force of the explosion that tore the satellite apart and took out the unlucky spacewalking astronaut, there is hardly a scratch on the alien furnace, er, spacecraft.

Screenshot - Alien spacecraft exterior in Hangar 18 (1980)
"Gentlemen, behold the Sunn Classic 3000, the most powerful heating and air conditioning unit in the galaxy!"

Fortunately for the team the thing opens up on its own, and they’re able to marvel at advanced alien heating and cooling, er, space technology. I won’t get into too many spoilers, except to say that at least the craft’s interior and instruments are better conceived and are a couple of grades above the usual low-budget spaceship that looks like it was outfitted by Radio Shack.

Also, the team’s linguist, Neal Kelso (Andrew Bloch) is able to decode the alien language incredibly quickly, and his discoveries are pretty much a laundry list of von Däniken’s ancient astronaut theories.

Coming at the end of the turbulent ‘70s, Hangar 18 is an encapsulation of the post-Vietnam/Watergate distrust of government and the surge of interest in UFOs, the paranormal and assorted alternate “realities.”

The company behind Hangar 18, Sunn Classic Pictures, had already established a reputation for sensationalistic documentaries such as The Mysterious Monsters (1975; a survey of a whole range of paranormal creatures and topics), The Outer Space Connection (1975; more ancient astronauts), In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), and The Bermuda Triangle (1979).

During that period, Sunn Classic interspersed the documentaries with family-friendly, rural-oriented dramas like The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974) and The Adventures of Frontier Fremont (1976), but after the company was bought by Taft Enterprises in 1980, the theatrical output turned almost exclusively to sci-fi and horror, with such notable releases as The Boogens (1981), Cujo (1983) and The Running Man (1987) following on the heels of Hangar 18.

Hangar 18 is the ultimate Sunn Classic picture, combining Watergate-style conspiracies, Roswell rumors, alien autopsies and speculation about ancient alien visitations into one dramatic package (although how well the parts fit together is open to debate).

Screenshot - Alien spacecraft interior, Hangar 18 (1980)
Marveling at the alien viewscreen's crispness and clarity, Phil suddenly realized he would need to upgrade his TV before the Big Game.

The film’s ending is abrupt and violent, yet a radio broadcast voice over as the end credits roll strikes a note of cautious optimism. Hangar 18 seems like a pop culture bridge between the pessimism and cynicism of the ‘70s and Reagan’s Morning in America which was just dawning (and which itself turned out to be as phony as a Sunn Classic documentary, but that’s a discussion for another time).

Speaking of ‘70s signifiers, Hangar 18’s acting leads exemplify the decade as well as anyone. In the ‘60s, Robert Vaughn vaulted to fame as the suave spy Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After that stint, he shed the action star veneer for character roles, especially authority figures. Perusing his IMDb resume for just the '70s alone, he portrayed two U.S. presidents along with a multitude of senators, military officers and corporate executives, many of them corrupt like his character in Hangar 18.

On the flip side, one of the highlights of Darren McGavin’s career came in the early to mid-’70s with his portrayal of bedraggled newshound Carl Kolchak in two Night Stalker TV movies and a short-lived series. Kolchak was the paranormal world’s answer to Woodward and Bernstein, constantly fighting to unearth stories of strange creatures and supernatural forces that the authorities preferred to keep under wraps (the X-Files’ Mulder and Scully would take up the cause in the ‘90s). Unlike Vaughn, who had a facility for portraying human snakes, McGavin was naturally cheerful and gregarious, so he was almost always cast as a reliable, if somewhat put upon, good guy.

Screenshot - Darren McGavin as Harry Forbes talks to fellow scientists in Hangar 18 (1980)
Harry Forbes (Darren McGavin, right) channels the inquisitive spirit of Carl Kolchak in Hangar 18.

Astronauts Bancroft and Price were played by two solid character actors, both of whose career heydays were in the ‘70s. Gary Collins guested on some of the decade’s most iconic TV shows, including Hawaii 5-0, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels (he also starred as a paranormal investigator in the short-lived series The Sixth Sense).

Similarly, James Hampton was all over TV and low-budget movies, but scored a couple of memorable supporting roles in two big hits, The Longest Yard (1974, with Burt Reynolds) and The China Syndrome (1979, with Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon).

Hangar 18 tries valiantly to be a taut sci-fi thriller, but the effort is hampered by TV movie-grade chase scenes, the prosaic-looking alien craft, and some dull stretches. 

Screenshot - Gary Collins and James Hampton in Hangar 18 (1980)
Bancroft and Price take a breather between encounters with Men in Black.

Vaughn and McGavin give it their all playing the impassioned bureaucrats (is that an oxymoron?). They each have their moments, but too much dialog and too many close-ups of furrowed brows slows down the middle part of the movie considerably. 

Perhaps the most fun to be had with Hangar 18 is counting the various homages and references to UFO lore. Additionally, it’s a great artifact of late-'70s paranoia (some would say sober realism). Maybe that’s enough to recommend it.

Where to find it: DVD | Streaming

January 11, 2024

Announcing the 2nd Annual 'Favorite Stars in B Movies' Blogathon

Banner - 2nd Annual "Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon - William Shatner & Ida Lupino in The Devil's Rain

I hope that all of you had a great holiday season and that 2024 is treating you well!

With the new year comes resolutions, plans and... blogathons. My second hope for 2024 is that all you bloggers out there will resolve to participate in the second annual "Favorite Stars in B Movies" blogathon, scheduled for Friday, April 12, 2024 through Sunday the 14th.

I was extremely gratified by the response to my first ever Favorite Stars blogathon. I think part of the reason is that the topic conjures up a number of interesting possibilities:

  • Future A-list stars who paid their dues doing B quickies
  • Former A listers who, in the twilight of their careers, accepted roles in low-budget movies in order to keep working
  • Stars who got fed up with oppressive studio control and struck off on their own in independent pictures
  • Actors who never made it out of the B leagues, but whose work nonetheless made them instantly recognizable
  • Unheralded actors who labored all their careers in the Bs, and merit recognition

A reminder (in case you missed the last blogathon): Being a laid-back sort of guy, I am open to various interpretations of the term "B movie." For a convenient yardstick, let's consider Wikipedia's definition: “a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not an arthouse film.”

Per last year's guidelines, we're looking for new posts, podcasts or YouTube videos on the topic. We'll also stick to the "one movie title per blogathon" rule, so if you want to write about, let's say, the stars of The Devil's Rain, get your reservation in early before someone else claims it (but other mentions of the film in the context of a career overview or list are perfectly fine).

Last year's contributions were largely about stars and films from the 1930s to the '80s, and that seems like a good bet for this go round. But if another era interests you, or you want to write about a performance in a direct-to-video title, that's fine by me (with the exception of episodic shows and broadcast TV movies, which we'll save for another time).

Thanks to everyone who made this year's blogathon a great success! Here are the day by day entries:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

The Details (what, when, where, why, how):

What: The 2nd Annual 'Favorite Stars in B Movies' Blogathon

When: April 12 - 14, 2024 (Friday - Sunday)

Where: Filmsfrombeyond.com

Why: Because you know you want to.

How: Contact me with your blog/vlog/podcast name and actor/actress and film (or just actor name if you're doing a career overview or list); use the comments below, email me at brschuck66@yahoo.com, or reach out on X (formerly known as Twitter) via @brschuck66.

I will use this page to keep track of the participants. On or around the dates of the blogathon, send me the link to your post via any of the contact methods above, and I will publish submissions in three daily, digestible parts in the order I receive them.

Hope to hear from you soon!

And now, the roster of blog and film stars (so far):

Brian at Films From Beyond the Time Barrier: Ginger Rogers in The Thirteenth Guest (1932)

Marianne at Make Mine Film Noir: Gene Kelly in The Devil Makes Three (1952)

Barry at Cinematic Catharsis: Jack Palance and Martin Landau in Without Warning (1980)

Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews: Franco Nero in Enter the Ninja (1981)

Rebecca at Taking Up Room: DeForest Kelley in Night of the Lepus (1972)

John at tales from the freakboy zone: Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Ruth at Silver Screenings: Loretta Young in Cause for Alarm! (1951)

Joey at The Last Drive In: Ava Gardner in Tam Lin (1970) and Carroll Baker in Baba Yaga (1973)

Joey at Wolffian Classic Movies Digest: Basil Rathbone in The Magic Sword (1962)

The Flashback Fanatic: George (Superman) Reeves and Ralph (Dick Tracy) Byrd in Thunder in the Pines (1948)

Andrew at The Stop Button: Dana Andrews in Zero Hour! (1957)

Mike at Mike's Movie Room: Veronica Lake in Flesh Feast (1970)

Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In: Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)

Rachel at Hamlette's Soliloquy: Alan Ladd in Paper Bullets (1941)

Kayla at Whimsically Classic: Steve McQueen in The Blob (1958)

Virginie at The Wonderful World of Cinema: Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Robert Young in Crossfire (1947)

Debbi at I Found it at the Movies: Ray Milland in Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937)

Michael at Maniacs and Monsters: Raymond Burr in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1954) and Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

Dustin at Horror and Sons: Peter Cushing in The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957)

Daffny at A Vintage Nerd: Vincent Price, John Carradine and Donald Pleasence in The Monster Club (1981)

Andrew at Maniacs and Monsters: George Clooney, Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen in Grizzly II: Revenge (1983)

Frank at Smoke in the Library: Ross Hagen in Wonder Women (1973)

Christianne at Krell Laboratories: The "graylist" films of Edward G. Robinson after his encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee

Kristen at Hoofers and Honeys: Lucille Ball in Du Barry was a Lady (1943)

Crystal at In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood: Bette Davis in Dead Ringer (1964)

If you'd like to help promote the blogathon, grab one of these fine, informative banners for your own site:

Banner - "The 2nd Annual "Favorite Stars in B Movies" Blogathon - Dana Andrews in The Frozen Dead


Banner - "The 2nd Annual "Favorite Stars in B Movies" Blogathon - Charles Bronson in House of Wax

Banner - "The 2nd Annual "Favorite Stars in B Movies" Blogathon - Joan Fontaine in The Witches

Banner - "The 2nd Annual "Favorite Stars in B Movies" Blogathon - Ava Gardner and Ian McShane in Tam Lin (aka The Devil's Widow)

January 1, 2024

Ringing in the New Year at Holiday Inn

- "That's the ugliest Baby New Year I've ever seen!"
- "Last year's was almost as bad!"
- "The worst ones show up in election years."
- "Don't look it in the eyes!"
Thank you so much for following Films From Beyond! Here's wishing you a Happy New Year and monstrously good 2024!