Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Director:

Craig Baldwin

Writer:

Craig Baldwin (writer)

Release Date:

27 November 1992 (Australia)

Genre:

Comedy | Sci-Fi

Plot:

In the year 1000, aliens from the planet Quetzalcoatl flee their dying planet and take refuge under the Earth's surface...

Plot Keywords:

Alien | CIA | Media | Conspiracy | Film Clip

Cast

Maurice Bishop	...	Himself - Prime Minister of Grenada (archive footage)
Jimmy Carter	...	Himself (archive footage)
Fidel Castro	...	Himself (archive footage)
John Foster Dulles	...	Himself (archive footage)
Dwight D. Eisenhower	...	Himself (archive footage)
Howard Hughes	...	Himself (archive footage)
E. Howard Hunt	...	Himself (archive footage)
John F. Kennedy	...	Himself (archive footage)
Sean Kilkoyne	...	Narrator (voice)
Henry Kissinger	...	Himself (archive footage) (as Dr. Henry Kissinger)
Oliver North	...	Himself (archive footage)
Ronald Reagan	...	Himself (archive footage)

Runtime:

48 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Australia:M | USA:Unrated

Quotes:

[regarding the longevity of Fidel Castro]
Narrator: After thirty-three failed assassination attempts, entailing two thousand people, and fifty million dollars; they are horrified to realize that you can't kill something that isn't alive.

Movie Connections:

Features El hombre que logró ser invisible (1958)

imperfect cinema at its best

The cinematic equivalent of John Oswald's plunderphonics which takes as its theme the demented paranoia of Cold-War militarism and fleshes it out with an ultra-critical pastiche of found-footage, comprising SF and black ops imagery amonst other stock sources, to launch a sustained attack on US intervention against the self determination movements of Latin America. Baldwin has called it a "pseudo pseudo documentary," a film that tells the truth about American imperialism and anti-socialist countersubversion through the faux documentary genre. At a formal level, Baldwin's film is an exercise in Brechtian postmodernism in which techniques of defamiliarization, verfremdungseffect, and cognitive shock tactics are exploited to produce a work of political art that is at once incisive and baffling. Ostensibly, the film claims to reveal an ancient conspiracy in which a race of aliens, originating, appropriately, from the planet Quetzalcoatl, have infiltrated South America and are waging a clandestine war with the United States. However, through its formal techniques and diacritical strategies, Tribulation 99 is simultaneously engaged in a damning indictment of the US government's historically tenured policy of political destabilisation throughout the Americas.