I’m not sure why there aren’t more movies like Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America. To make one all you need is some found footge – real found footage, not stuff you faked – an edit suite and a voiceover. Plus ideas.
This strange movie from 1992 is a collage of bits and pieces that writer/director Craig Baldwin got his hands on when, according to Wikipedia, lots of film works were being “discarded by institutions changing to VHS” (who would discard film for VHS, makes no sense at all). Baldwin snapped up bits of pieces of celluloid heading for the dumpster and headed off to make his film with them, picking up Sean Kilkoyne en route to add a rasping, urgent voiceover for reportage veracity.
Using what he calls a “flea market sensibility”, Baldwin collages together cheap old sci-fi, newsreel and documentary footage, not caring too much whether it’s colour or black and white, high quality or low. And spins out a story about aliens escaping a cataclysm, settling on Earth in its hollow centre (who knew?) and getting on with the knotty problem of mating with snakes, because their genitalia were so mutated that they couldn’t mate with anything else.
Eventually, millennia down the line, having built underground cities out of their own excrement, and having stayed hidden away in their own subterranean realm, the aliens were provoked into action by human atomic weapons tests. Their interest in what was going on upstairs soon escalated. They started to intervene, leading to the spate of sightings of UFOs in 1950s America. Baldwin reveals, or Kilkoyne’s voiceover does, that President Eisenhower met with the aliens and even took a ride round the planet in one of their ships.
Somewhere around this point the actual purpose of all this counterfactuality starts to assert itself. In among the alien arcana there’s another story being told, of imperial America intervening in the affairs of other countries. By constant cross-cutting between footage of Howard Hughes, James Bond or the image of JFK heading towards the bullet with his name on, Baldwin starts to elide science-fiction with conspiracy theorising, and then slips from there into a bunch of different stories with a common them: the repeated attempts on the life of Fidel Castro; democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz’s attempt to take on the US-owned United Fruit Company and how that ended in a coup organised in Washington; and the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, again CIA instigated.
Eventually the political starts to supplant the sci-fi, but thanks to Baldwin’s method, it never feels hectoring. There is humour in here and comic juxtaposition. Seeing Sean Connery popping up – hazy, grainy and mute – as some piece of recent history is being hashed over is kind of cute.
It’s a short film, only 48 minutes long, and thanks to tight editing and constant forward thrust, it feels even shorter. Baldwin hits us with on-screen headlines – “The Mayan Factor”, “Nation Rises Up Against Nation”, “1959: Cigar Shapes In The Sky” – mixing the fantastical with the conspiratorial and the historical – constantly moving, perhaps to avoid the charge of being a political bore, the sort of guy you want to get away from at a party.
Influenced to an extent by the film Chariots of the Gods, which gave screen life to the theorising of Erich von Däniken’s about alien interference in human affairs, Baldwin’s film gives us death rays, gigantic creatures and space ships alongside Klaus Barbie, Henry Kissinger and Augusto Pinochet. Global warming gets namechecked alongside General Noriega, swine flu, plagues of locusts and the hole in the ozone layer. Ronald Reagan turns up, and so does Oliver North – you can tell when this was made.
It’s a mad stew but there’s is a method to this “pseudo-pseudocumentary”, and a purpose. Baldwin wants us to look and learn, without feeling we’re being force-fed. It works.
Tribulation: Alien Anomalies under America – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
