October Horror Challenge 2019 #63: "The Cremators"

This is one of those movies that I've wanted to see forever, but I kept getting distracted by shiny objects and watching other movies instead. Still, I kept that movie poster in the back of my mind (check it out! Isn't that awesome?) I always intended to watch this movie someday, so when Anazon started bothering me trying to get me to watch it, I figured it was a sign for me to finally check it out.

This movie is about aliens that come to earth to torch all the people and start over from scratch. I have days when that seems like a good idea too. As the movie begins, we learn that a meteor once crashed to earth carrying unknown life forms, and that these life forms observed us all destroying the earth and wasting its resources over time. No wonder the aliens hate us. Yeesh. It's embarrassing. So pieces of the meteor lay buried in the desert,  waiting to be discovered, but those who discover them are in great danger.

The first character we meet is a scientist in present day (when present day was the 70s) finding part of the meteor that once crashed to earth and trying to analyze it, but instead releasing the pissed off fire creatures that start to burn everyone in sight. And then another scientist is all like "hey, I want to get incinerated too!" So he starts researching the meteor creatures too, and the cops and everyone else in the small town are trying to figure out what's going on and how a guy was reduced to ash, but they keep refusing to believe there's anything weird going on, and they insist it must be lightening. Right.

Soon we meet yet ANOTHER scientist who wants to study parts of the meteor, and he connects the little glowing rocks to the deaths by burning, and further connects those to local legends about balls of fire that roll through the desert, incinerating everything in their path. It's kind of hard to make big balls of fire scary, but I gotta say, when some of the victims were being chased by these things, it was actually kinda creepy. Score one for great balls of fire, even though the characters were idiots for getting themselves into this situation (I wouldn't pick up little glowing rocks in the first place, let alone keep them after everyone else who had them got burned to a crisp).

So while this movie has some of the dumbest lines in cinematic history (I can't tell you, because they give away a major plot point, but the whole scene was so stupid I had to rewind the movie and listen again to make sure I heard it right) I can't say I regret watching it. There's enough good here to keep me involved, and even the bad is entertaining enough to be amusing.