If you like watching a bunch of people skiing around, you'll love this. An alien saucer lands in the opening round of the movie, and just sits there for about an hour of film running time before anything else involving it happens.

I saw this on one of those late night live-monster host shows, and the riffs the guy did kept the movie from being pretty boring. There's some scientists that want to see the "meteor" that came down, a romance between a couple who flirt on the ski runs, and some other folks that do a reenactment of the mob scene from Frankenstein. You have to wait a long time to see the creature, a really really big hairy guy with ugly teeth, and his brief scene is pretty campy. Still, I liked the Jolly Neanderthal Giant. As for aliens, they show up only once too, just staring at somebody. (One is seen a couple of times from the back, always watching TV).

Innocently silly and mildly amusing. There's loose ends at the end deliberately left for you to ponder. Or laugh at.

On the DVD I rented there were two versions of the same movie, Horror in the Midnight Sun, and Invasion of the Animal People. Although these are quite different, IMDb has these listed together as Rymdinvasion i Lappland. Horror in the Midnight Sun was a fairly decent movie. It's another low budget B movie from the late 50s. A lot of these have their problems and Horror in the Midnight Sun is no exception but it is an entertaining movie. It was also interesting to watch a movie of this genre that is Swedish/American made. It's a Swedish version of a B Sci/Fi monster movie. I'm glad I watched it. It was nothing special but still decent. Invasion of the Animal People was not as good and by itself would be a mess. When seen after watching Horror in the Midnight Sun, it does show how a movie can be cut up, pieces spliced in and the movie changed. Watching to see what and how the film was changed was the only thing I found interesting with Invasion of the Animal People. If you're really into 50s Sci/Fi B monster movies, you should take a look at Horror In The Midnight Sun but if you only have a chance to see Invasion of the Animal People, don't bother.

** HERE BE SPOILERS **

Recap: An apparent meteor lands in the snow cowered wilderness in northern Sweden. Strangely enough it seems like it did a horizontal landing instead of a vertical strike with crater and all. A team of scientists are flown in from Stockholm and travels out to the site. There it is apparent that it is no meteor but an alien spacecraft. At the same time there are reports of a huge monster running about.

Comment: This is a typical B-movie scifi horror kind of thing that were not uncommon in the fifties. What I didn't know that there was one produced and filmed in Sweden. Unfortunately the story could have been better, it contains far to little action, far too little events. The ending is open, no questions answered, and in all honesty, pretty lame. Otherwise, I got what I expected. Some shots of the monster, a little love story and a bunch of minor goofs (such as the usage of a plane that has already been destroyed, but I guess the producers had only one available (they could have changed registration numbers though), and that skiers seem to go downhill almost always.) I think the cast did good with the material at hand, and there are no major errors in the directing either. The story is too thin, that's all. But they got to show some of Swedens landmarks... And it was fun as I have been in the region where the film was shot.