Directed by Greydon Clark in 1980 and an obvious attempt to cash in on the UFO mania that was sweeping the country around this time, The Return takes place in a small town somewhere out in the desert where a prospector (Vincent Schiavelli) and two young kids, a boy and a girl, are mysteriously abducted by a UFO in a flurry of lights and strange noises.

Twenty-five years later, that young girl has grown into a beautiful woman named Jennifer (Cybil Shepherd) who makes a living working for her father, a scientist type named Dr. Kramer (Raymond Burr). The prospector has carried on as well, going about his life, while the young boy, Wayne (Jan-Michael Vincent), no works as a cop under Sheriff Niles Buchanan (Martin Landau). On a day more or less like any other, Jennifer heads into the area near where the abduction took place decades back to check on some strange seismic activity in the area. At the same time, it turns out that someone or something has been slaughtering cattle in the area, which means Wayne's going to have to hop into his cruiser and go check out the scene. As such, they're reunited but when the locals accuse Jennifer of being responsible for killing the cows, it's obviously a reunion occurring under less than ideal circumstances. Wayne stands his ground, however. He knows it wasn't her and isn't afraid to speak up on her behalf.

Shortly after this not-so-sweet reunion though, things get messy. Whatever is killing the cows takes things up a level and moves from bovine to human victims. Residents wind up getting slaughtered in increasingly gory ways and the only ones who are able to figure out what's really going on here are Wayne and Jennifer, because they know that UFOs are real and that the aliens have returned…

First things first, The Return is not a good movie. It's a fun movie, to be sure, and it's plenty entertaining, but it doesn't feature particularly good acting or much in the way of cohesion in regards to the story it attempts to tell. What it does offer is the rare opportunity to watch an interesting cast make a fascinating series of fumbles for just over ninety minutes, with a few weird effects set pieces thrown in for good measure. Raymond Burr is obviously reading his lines rather than delivering them with any sort of conviction (Shepherd wrote years back that he was reading from a teleprompter and Clark backs that up in the disc's supplements!) while Martin Landau can't seem to do anything but look evil. Vincent is obviously half corked if not completely lit for pretty much the entire movie and while this was made during a ‘hot' period for him, you can easily see here the onset of the alcohol abuse problems that would soon pretty much sink his career. That leaves Cybil Shepherd to save the movie, and she can't do that. Her part isn't deep enough or interesting enough, but hey, she looks completely beautiful here, so there's that. Neville Brand and Vincent Schiavelli pop up here too, they're amusing enough.

What makes the movie interesting, aside from the train wreck factor, is how it attempts to craft a scary story on a low budget by substituting goofy effects work for genuine suspense. Aliens are landing and possibly abducting small children? OK, tell that guy over there in the electrical department that we need to bath everything in strangely colored blinking lights because we don't have the budget to really make much of a flying saucer. There are multiple instances throughout the movie where Clark seems to be trying to dazzle us with genuinely bad effects presumably in an attempt to distract us from how nonsensical it all is. This might sound like the movie is awful, and on most technical levels, that's true but there some interesting oddities here. The movie works in some unexpected cult related threads and it's never a bad thing when a film features an inter-dimensional portal, right? Of course the science behind all of it is nonsense but there's no reason to let something like logic disrupt your enjoyment of a B-grade Sci-fi horror mash-up. This is fun. It's goofy, it's got massive plot holes and it wears its low budget on its sleeve, but it is entertaining and in the end, that's what we want out of a movie like The Return.

Video:

Scorpion Releasing offers up The Return in 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen and in pretty nice shape. Colors are bright and bold without looking oversaturated and while there is some softness that looks to be inherent in the 80s photography used in the movie, detail is pretty strong regardless. Some of the night scenes look a little dark, but again, this looks like an issue with the source and not the transfer. There are no issues with compression artifacts or edge enhancement and all in all, the movie debuts on DVD looking very good.