hyped garbage

Excellent but underrated film

As Good As It Gets

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

"Hanger 18" is from Sunn Classic Pictures....a now-defunct studio that brought us some quirky, paranoid films such as "The Outer Space Connection" (a documentary that claimed ancient civilizations were in constant contact with aliens who, apparently, made their cool structures) and "In Search for Noah's Ark". I expected very, very little from a Sunn film...that's for sure. However, the longer I watched the film, the more I realized it wasn't bad at all. Paranoid...yes...bad....no.The film begins with footage of the space shuttle that looks dated today...but was amazing stuff for 1980. Consider this...years before the creation of Pixar, the film shows a lot of high tech CGI effects of the shuttle. I didn't have any idea how Sunn could afford this. It was only in the end credits where the studio thanked both NASA and Rockwell International....and it's likely they got the footage from them, as studios of the day simply didn't have the money or HUGE computers needed for such graphics. Regardless, it was pretty good footage.While on a routine mission to deploy a satellite, the satellite accidentally collides with a UFO...and the UFO crashes to the Earth. This portion and the scientific study of the ship...all this was very well done and interesting. But there's another plot...one which seemed too influenced by Watergate...where some presidential aids take control of how to tell...or NOT tell the public. This portion, while interesting in its own way, kept the film from being better...that is until the nice twist ending. Overall, a solid sci-fi film masquerading as yet another lousy Sunn film. Well worth seeing and highly original.

Granted that this is an old movie, I still decided to give it a chance because of the story that it is dealing with.I didn't have any particular high expectations for the movie before I sat down to watch it, and perhaps it was good that I didn't, because this movie wasn't particularly outstanding or entertaining actually. At best it was a less than mediocre movie experience and I doubt that it actually raised much attention even back in the 80s.The storyline was too generic and predictable to be properly entertaining. And it was frustrating that you could sense whatever was coming a mile away.The cast were doing an adequate job with their granted roles and characters, but they were fighting an uphill battle.I managed to sit through "Hangar 18" to the end, and can honestly say that this is not a movie that I will be revisiting.

(Some Spoilers) Not as bad as it looks now some 25 years after it's release. "Hanger 18" is the first major motion picture to bring on the screen the Eric Van Daniken hypothesis from his best selling book "Chariots of the Gods" and the recent, back in 1980, revelations of the mysterious 1947 Roswell crash brought out in the William Moore's UFO classic "The Roswell Incident" and fuses the two subjects together into a movie. Out in space astronauts Bancroft Price & Gates, Garry Collins James Hampton & J.R Clark, are about to launch a satellite from their space craft when this UFO suddenly appears and hovers over their spaceship. Unable to prevent the launch it goes off and slams into the UFO. The explosion of the satellite cause Gates to be ripped from out of the craft and end up dead. The NASA crew monitoring the launch, back on earth in Huston, catches the entire scene on tape but it's soon deleted, or erased, by orders from higher ups and both Bancroft & Price are implicated in Gates death due to their negligence . With two weeks before the presidential election President Duncon Tyler's staff headed by Gordon Cain & Frank Lafferty, Robert Vaughn & Joseph Campanella, want the incident to be kept from the public in order not to hurt Tyler's chances for re-election. The UFO that caused all this nervousness in both the White House and the Pentagon wasn't destroyed by the space-crafts satellite it landed safe on earth in Bannon County Arizona with it's two alien pilots, or spacemen, dead of asphyxiation. The news of that amazing fact can well destroy Tyler's chances.President Tyler made a big issue of his opponent believing in UFO's now just 14 days before the election there's solid evidence that they do exist! With both Bancroft and Price trying to find NASA deputy director and friend Harry Forbes, Darren McGavin, to exonerate them in Gates' death Forbes, and his staff at NASA, are then sent to Wolf AFB in Midland Texas at the facilities Hanger 18 where the UFO is being held.Not knowing what's happening in the outside world Forbes & Co. were kept in the dark about what was going on with both Bancroft & Price. Forbes and his assistants Paul Bannister, Steven Keats, and Neal Kelso, Andrew Bloch, decipher the alien hieroglyphs and come to the startling conclusion that their not only studying the Human Race but in fact created it tens of thousands of years ago! The aliens may well be the "missing link" between man and ape! Forbes shocked at what he found out astoundingly says of the aliens to his stunned and shocked staff: "Were Their Children!" Back outside Bancroft & Price who are trying to get to Wolf AFB and Hanger 18 are cased by government agents which results in Price, as well as four agents, getting killed. Finally Bancroft reaching the Wolf military base and getting in touch with Forbes, who found out about what was going on by listening to a radio, and his staff to go pubic with what's been happening at Hanger 18 and how the US government is trying to cover it up. Feeling that their control of the information about the captured UFO is slipping away from them and that it's only a matter of time before the US, and world, public will know the truth Cain & Co. have a jet, loaded with high explosives, flown into Hanger 18 by remote control in order to destroy the evidence as well as Bancroft Forbes and everyone else in there; planes crash every day a diabolical Cain tells his fellow criminals and future cell-mates.Cain's scheme is only partly successful because what he didn't count on is that the UFO is not of this earth and thus not subject to the damage that the explosives on the runaway jet plane can do to it. Even more disturbing, to Cain & Co., Forbes Bancroft and Forbes entire NASA staff were in the UFO at the time that the plane crashed into Hanger 18.

Yes, this film really was made!Get out your house-sized grain of salt! Basically, a satellite emplacement goes awry because the satellite collides with an alien spaceship running on autopilot and bound for an automated landing on earth. A pair of shuttle pilots witness the event and, predictably, a government cover-up ensues which attempts to cast blame on the astronauts themselves. The alien ship lands and is dragged off for investigation in the infamous Hanger 18. NASA, the military and the US government then all have to figure out what to do about it.While the plot is admittedly silly, the dialog sometimes ridiculous, and the characters sort of one-dimensional, the screenwriters did a decent job of pacing and developing and telling the story. There are only a few entirely absurd parts. For example - while on the run, Gary Collins seems, under any circumstances, to be able to find a car with keys in the ignition and an owner who doesn't really care if he steals it. And almost every single scene in the film has two people in it.While not exactly gripping or engaging, this is an entertaining little film to be viewed after midnight on any sleepless weeknight. Hanger 18 is slightly more credible than most X-Files episodes and slightly less well-scripted and shot. Performances are mostly fairly good, but Darren McGavin painfully over-acts most of his scenes and the number of hypertensive yelling and fist pounding scenes by the entire cast really detracts from the overall experience in a big way. Perhaps the director had a troubled childhood or just kept a too-large pot of coffee available on the set at all times. We'll probably never know. But I know that I can rate this one "somewhat more entertaining than most X-Files episodes" which, unfortunately, is more of a comment on the X-Files than this movie.