James L. Conway‘s Hangar 18 is one of those peculiar films whose premise is so beguiling that it has, in some quarters at least, become “fact”. You don’t have to wander too far into the murkier depths of the internet to find people who believe that there really was a Hanger 18 (there wasn’t, at least not one that housed crashed alien spaceships) and the story has become intrinsically linked with tales of UFO crashes at Roswell, alien abductions and Erich Von Danniken’s theories of ancient aliens. An opening caption suggesting that what we’re about to see is all real only fuelled the real-life conspiracists hell-bent on believing any old nonsense they happen upon.
A space shuttle in orbit is destroyed when the satellite it is launching collides with a UFO. The alien craft crashlands in the Arizona desert and is retrieved by the military who take it to Hangar 18 for study. With an election looming, the White House wants the discovery kept quite so as not to damage the President’s credibility. But two of the shuttle crew have survived and on their return to Earth find that NASA has become part of the cover-up and is blaming the disaster on the negligence of their now-dead commander. Unwilling to let them get away with it, the crewmen set out to expose the truth learning along the way that scientists have discovered humanoid aliens on board the ship, aliens that may have been breeding with humans for thousands of years.
Produced by Sunn Classics, the low-rent operation that churned out tacky “documentaries” on all sorts of Fortean subjects (The Mysterious Monsters (1975), In Search of Noah’s Ark (1977), Beyond and Back (1978), The Bermuda Triangle (1979), In Search of Historic Jesus (1980) and many others) as well as equally dreadful literary adaptations of the likes of The Time Machine (1978) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1980), it would be foolish to expect too much of Hangar 18. It really, really wants to be Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) but has neither the money nor the talent of Steven Spielberg to carry it off. Left with reduced finances, Conway – a Sunn Classics regular – falls back on old staples like car chases and people in white coats talking gobbledegook to get by. The end result is more a budget version of Capricorn One (1978) than a credible pretender to Close Encounter‘s throne.
One of the things that conspiracy theorists are never able to adequately explain is just how such a complex web of lies can be maintained when there are so many people involved, each one of them a potential leak. Here, the conspiracy is so appallingly inept that one can’t help wonder if anyone was actually running the show at all. Everyone involved in it is clearly an idiot, making endless bad decisions (why did they try to pin the accident on the shuttle crew and not just bring them into the conspiracy in the first place?) that require everyone else to be as moronic as they are for their plot to stay in place. At one point they seem to have hidden the evidence of the UFO crash site under a few branches left lying around in the desert. And the aliens are, if anything, even worse – travelling all that way here only to crash into a satellite the very second they arrive at their destination…
The cast is mostly made up of dependable small screen regulars, chief among then Robert Vaughn as a Presidential aide and Darren McGavin as the head of the team investigating the UFO. Although the two leads – Gary Collins and James Hampton – are rather bland, McGavin‘s enthusiasm is endearing and the film tends to perk up immeasurably whenever he’s around. The rest of the time it looks like a cheap pilot for a TV series (the sets are sparse, the music generic and the action scenes nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before) that never got made though it should be noted that both The X Files (1993-2018) and Tobe Hooper’s demented Lifeforce (1985) both owe the film a few favours. Conway ended up working almost exclusively in episodic television and the flat, 70s TV movie look of Hangar 18 suggests that, eventually, he found his natural home.
The special effects are pretty good for a film of this budget, nothing outstanding but serviceable enough, though the radar screen showing the UFO’s approach on the space shuttle looks like a late 70s computer game. The design of the UFO is pleasingly clunky, though on the ground it looks nothing like it did in space. But it was nice to see an alien spaceship that wasn’t perfectly circular or sleek and stereotypically rocketship in design. The box-like appearance of the ship was no doubt dictated by the budget but it works rather well nonetheless.
Hangar 18 was pilloried by the press when it opened in the summer of 1980 but the punters rather liked it. A second version of the film was shown on American television, retitled Invasion Force and boasting a new ending that was somewhat more upbeat than the original. That version remains unseen around these parts but to be fair, the ending was the least of the film’s problems. To get to the new, cheerier ending, we still have to sit through the same tedious political machinations, still have to struggle to get out heads around the stupidity of the conspirators and still try to work out exactly what it is that the aliens are really up to. Few answers are forthcoming and by the time you reach the end – either of them – you’ll probably have long since stopped caring.
Crew
Directed by: James L. Conway; [©] 1980 Sunn Classic Pictures; Produced by: Charles E. Sellier Jr; Screenplay by: Steven Thornley; Story by: Tom Chapman, James L. Conway; Director of Photography: Paul Hipp; Film Editor: Michael Spence; Music Composed and Conducted by: John Cacavas; Original Music by: Andrew Belling, John Cacavas; Costume Design by: Julie Staheli; Makeup Artist: Karoly Balazs; Makeup Effects: Ken Horn; Special Effects by: Harry Woolman; Special Optical Effects: Dave Gregory; Production Designer: Paul Staheli
Cast
Gary Collins (Steve Bancroft); Robert Vaughn (Gordon Cain); James Hampton (Lew Price); Philip Abbott (Lt General Frank Morrison); Joseph Campanella (Frank Lafferty); Pamela Bellwood (Dr Sarah Michaels); Tom Hallick (Phil Cameron); Steven Keats (Dr Paul Bannister); William Schallert (Professor Mills); Darren McGavin (Harry Forbes); Cliff Osmond (Sheriff Duane Barlow); Andrew Bloch (Neal Kelso); Stuart Pankin (Sam Tate); Betty Ann Carr (Flo Mattson); H.M. Wynant (flight director); Bill Zuckert (Ace Landon); Jesse Bennett (4th man in black); Robert Bristol (helicopter pilot); Ed E. Carroll (3rd man in black); J.R. Clark (Colonel Judd Gates)
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