 | My god, it's full of art deco!
rating: 2
This third-rate production concerning the government cover-up of a crashed and recovered UFO is of slight interest and some minor unintentional amusement. Performances range from middling to terrible; Vaughn makes the best of a mediocre script in a serviceable performance, while McGavin overacts as blandly as possible. The story moves along satisfactorily, in spite of plot holes that a gigantic alien mothership could easily navigate though. Highlights: violent, rampaging astronauts, the cleanest accidental beheading in interstellar history, space alien iconography and the most inept government agents ever assembled to preserve national security. This is a cut above the average TV movie and below mainstream feature fare.
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Hangar 18; oldie but goodie
rating: 5
A good story of how recovery of an alien spacecraft may very well have happened and what we would expect the government to do with it. Special effects really good for it's time.
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Hanger 18 spoof or proof
rating: 4
As there are many UFO movies out there, I was concerned about this one. I was pleasantly surprised. The theme, content, and acting was very good. The "props" were realistic and content believable. All these things make a fictional(?) presentation more enjoyable. Too many such shows are so far out there it is easy to get caught up in critiquing the goofs and "can't happens". This one is in line with the greats.
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Good movie but AWFUL DVD
rating: 2
I saw HANGAR 18 several times in the theater when I was in my early teens -- it fascinated me beyond just about any other movie I'd ever seen before. I always thought it was a more compelling movie than CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, even though it had only a fraction of the budget and some pretty terrible actors in it.
Reviewing the movie some 28 years later, I find that the story holds up quite well. It feels more like a '70s TV show than a feature film, but it is still intriguing and thought-provoking.
However, this is the worst-quality DVD I've ever seen. The video appears to have been transferred from an old VHS tape -- fuzzy picture, horrible fading of the colors and contrast. Even worse than the picture is the audio. It sounds as it the audio were transferred to a cassette tape, copied to another cassette tape, then dubbed back onto the picture. Hiss almost overwhelms thin, monophonic audio sound that comes from the speakers.
I also remember the ending of the movie as being different than what we see here. I don't know if this is just my memory playing tricks on me, but I feel like something has been changed rather significantly, and not necessarily for the better.
My advice would be for any fan of this movie or of this genre in general to hold out for a "remastered" version of the film -- but I doubt that we'll ever see anything like that. Almost no one seems to remember this movie, and I'm sure it wasn't a big box-office hit, so the likelihood of a studio spending money to clean it up is pretty slim. But we can always hope...
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Not Bad At All!
rating: 4
Even as a kid, I was totally into aliens etc, and when I first saw the previews for this movie back in 1979 (?), I was completely excited. Unfortuately, I never got a chance to see this movie until the mid-nineties. It was good then, and is still good today.
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