man, a "Bob Balaban bureaucrat", but during the screenwriting process, Condon and Laughlin decided to change the character to a woman and cast Fletcher who had been in Strange Behavior. Condon and Laughlin created a visual plan in advance and this helped them shoot the film quickly — in only five weeks. Laughlin was helped out by a second unit that worked on the film's visual and prosthetic effects. He hired Private Stock Effects to work on the visual effects. They had previously worked on Battle Beyond the Stars and Escape from New York. For the prosthetic alien effects, he hired James Cummins, a veteran of the John Carpenter film The Thing, and later, the writer and director of the cult horror classic The Boneyard, who had his name removed from the credits after heated debates with Laughlin about the way the effects were being used and shot. Laughlin relented and allowed Cummins to reshoot a lengthy scene near the end of the film where the aliens shed their human guises as they prepare to embark on a 1950s style spacecraft. Laughlin planned a third film in a proposed "Strange Trilogy", titled, The Adventures of Philip Strange, a World War II spy thriller with science fiction elements and hoped to cast many of the same actors and crew from his two previous films. Reception In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it, "a tasteful monster movie with a terrible secret: it eats other movies". Newsweek magazine's David Ansen wrote, "Hovering unclassifiably between nostalgia and satire, this amiably hip genre movie confirms Laughlin as a deliberately minor but unique stylist. It's up to the viewer to determine just how faux his naif style is, but either way you choose to take it, Strange Invaders offers a good deal of laid-back fun". Jay Scott in his review for The Globe and Mail wrote, "Strange Invaders is a pastiche, a film-school jumble of aphorisms and winks at the audience that are neither as knowing nor as amusing as they are meant to be". Colin Greenland reviewed Strange Invaders for Imagine magazine, and stated that "Strange Invaders never quite makes up its mind whether it's a send-up or a faithful recreation of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers; It Came From Outer Space; The Bubble; etc. It hovers somewhere in between: too naïve to be convincing, too self-conscious to be