Strange Invaders

'I've got you, under mah skeeen-ah!'. Loss of face gets a whole new twist in this unexpectedly well-developed pastiche: a welcome surprise, as it initially looks like a Disneyish soft-pedal over the familiar territory of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The twist is that when the aliens colonised a small town in the '50s - doing the usual trick of covering their own unsightly physogs with plastic replicas of several hundred decent Americans -it all happened with full governmental approval. Hassled hero LeMat has to confront opposition from both the official and the alien fronts before getting to the bottom of the mystery. The necessarily upbeat ending is all but made up for by some brilliant SFX and stabs of humour in the midnight vein of the great Gahan (National Lampoon, Playboy, etc) Wilson. Hugely entertaining and refreshingly gore-free.