The Return 1980 ***

I’ve been impressed by fellow blogger mikestakeatthemovies for his ability to come up with obscure titles featuring top-drawer talent, films like Dark Places or Contact on Cherry Street, suggesting a secret history of Hollywood stars. He’s well worth a follow. But perhaps some things should stay secret; that’s a reasonable reaction when confronted by such a strange proposition as The Return, which surfaces after decades of shame in a truly horrendous print on Amazon Prime. Wrongly listed as being from 1970 when it’s actually from 1980, Greydon Clark’s sci-fi melodrama is clearly a Close-Encounters rip-off that’s undercooked in many ways, but over-compensates in terms of familiar faces.

The subject is, surprisingly enough, cattle mutilation. In fact, the whole film seems to have been constructed in order to give every member of the cast the chance to say the words ‘cattle mutilation;’ several times over. Martin Landau has a weird line to the effect ‘everybody is all jazzed up about cattle mutilations’ which he says on regular occasions throughout the film. Other improbable stars who try their luck at discussing cattle mutilations include Cybill Shepherd and Jan-Michael Vincent, both in limbo between other, much more recognisable projects for television. Shepherd was post her collaborations with Peter Bogdanovich and pre-Moonlighting, while Vincent was post Hooper and pre Airwolf. They both look less than pleased about appearing in such grade A shlock as The Return, but they both grin and bear it as Wayne and Jennifer, two adults who realise that they have forgotten that they were encountered by aliens as children.

This doesn’t make much sense, but even less when set against a plot with sees Jennifer’s father (Raymond Burr) on the trail of a light-sabre wielding prospector played by Vincent Shiavelli, whose striking countenance is immediately recognisable from his iconic role as the subway ghost in Ghost. Could The Prospector be the key to the solving the spate of cattle mutilations that everyone’s talking about? Why is there a tunnel of light in his mine-shaft? What do we gain from seeing Jan-Michael Vincent ride a motorbike through a plate-glass window?

MST3K made comedic hay from Pod People, a Alien knock-off that was swiftly repurposed as an ET knock-off, creating memorably abrupt changes of tone, and The Return seems similarly discombobulated; that’s presumably why its cinema release back in 1980 didn’t happen. Films quite often have mistakes, but The Return really doesn’t even begin to make sense. If the unseen aliens are peaceful after all, why do they need lumps of cow-meat thrown down a tunnel to them? The Return is a film of remarkable awfulness, and one can only imagine how thrilled Cybill Shepherd must be to see this get a fresh re-release via streaming services. And who are the couple featured in the cover-art below? They look like Jodie Foster with toothache and Richard Benjamin’s creepy half-brother…