This has to be the shaggiest shaggy dog story ever told.
For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, a shaggy dog story is a long, complex, overly detailed comic story which ends up with a goofy non-sequitur twist that makes nonsense of everything we just heard.
Which is exactly what we have here.
I first saw this one in the theater on the day it came out. I’d rushed to see it because it was a new Joe Dante film and was there for the first matinee of the day.
Only the film hadn’t arrived until moments before, and they had to splice and transfer the film to the single big reel their projector used. It would be at least an hour before they were ready to go.
I’ve never had that happen to me before or since.
So we came back for the second scheduled showing, and saw an interesting, often comic film about three young kids receiving strange messages in their dreams and building a space ship. It had just reached a very creepy moment when they reached the alien spaceship that had seized control of their craft and found themselves in a vast, dark network of tubes full of mist with no sign of their hosts…
When a silly alien appeared at the top of the screen, talking utter backwards gibberish and moving in reverse.
They’d spliced the second to last reel in upside down and backwards!
That, of course, was my Shaggy dog story about this shaggy dog story: I’m sure many of you will be interested to note that when we left, the theater manager was waiting for us in the lobby (something I’d never seen happen before), staring at us. We stared back, waiting for him to give us our money back. It didn’t happen. None of us demanded it and everyone left grumbling.
So my opinion of this one was perhaps even lower that it might have been had we seen it the way it was meant to be, and hadn’t missed the sequence leading up to the revelation of this very silly alien. Yes, somewhere later in the Eighties, I did catch it on VHS, and was impressed by just how creepy the rest of the sequence of the three Explorers wandering through the bowels of the alien ship proved to be. But that just made the absurd double whammy of an ending even more aggravating.
But, after more than thirty years, I finally returned to this one and found, much to my surprise that I quite like it now.
I suppose it helps that I know exactly what to expect, so I don’t have to waste any time on getting mad at Joe and thinking “what an utterly stupid way to end a great movie.”
And Explorers does come dangerously close to being a great movie: it starts with the first of the dreams, introduces its characters and builds the story up slowly as they build the device Ben (Ethan Hawke) dreamed about They try to understand what it does, carry out a series of experiments, then decide to use it to build a space ship.
It’s a little amusing to note that River Phoenix played the genius kid, Wolfgang (and James Cromwell, one of the best character actors out there, plays his eccentric scientist dad). Roger Corman alumni, Joe Dante favorite and the guy who played Walter Paisley in A Bucket of Blood, Dick Miller, shows up as a police helicopter pilot who tracks the boys down, and another Dante favorite, Robert Picardo (who, yes, is now best remembered for his role on Star Trek: Voyager) stars in the goofy, Italian Drive-In movie-within-a-movie and gets to play two of the silly aliens.
He even has hair.
The film gives us a bit of comedy, a bit of the old Stand by Me joys of childhood thing, suspense, mystery, and finally turns very creepy…
And then those darn aliens show up.
Followed by something even sillier and more absurd.
And really, really shaggy.
It’s funny, though, that years later I find myself appreciating it. it is a remarkably well made little film, and the way he gradually introduces the silliness at the end actually makes it a bit easier to accept. I love the many reference to classic Fifties SF (including a lot of familiar film clips) and the deep longing the film expresses for something greater and higher than our every day life. It is also good to see Dick Miller get a more complex and interesting part for a change.
And that movie-within-the-movie, playing at the Drive-In, is a hysterically dead on parody of the worst Italian SF movies — while still remarkably affectionate.
So it used to frustrate me and now it doesn’t, I used to think that the ending ruined the film, and now I don’t, and this time around I had a very good time watching it.
Of course, your experience may vary…
And I have a long and very complicated story about that…
rivets on the poster 
I’ve with the older you; love the ending!
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An interesting side note: It would appear that this time around I probably watched the longer Euro cut. It includes a lot more of Dick Miller and builds up his character far more than the theatrical cut did. This happens so often that you have to wonder whose brilliant idea it was to cut great material out of so many films, effectively crippling them…
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