Reviewing COMMUNION with Andrew Sanford/Somewhere in the Skies?

A penny for your subliminal thoughts?-)

I stumbled across a movie review of the 1989 film that was made from Whitley Strieber's book 'Communion' and I must admit that the review does resonate with my thoughts surrounding the whole 'Communion' saga.
If you haven't seen the movie yet, I highly recommend that you read the book first (the book is worth a read I think, in fact I have read it twice in my life so far and haven't ruled out a third yet) then watch this film, which is to be honest, a rather wacky interpretation of the novel.
But if you want a pop-cultural study of the late 80s onward then the book and the movie are worth a watch, even if like me you are on the fence about the whole UFO thing.
Of course, some people seem to think I'm a hybrid alien I've been told, so of course I would tell you I'm a fence sitter in that case, wouldn't I?-)
Oh, how I do like to stir up the gullible people out there:-)
But which side of the fence are they on?-)
I better stop with those alien jokes[?-] before I find myself in a cell in Cuba being waterboarded by the "good guys";-)
Or probed for all I'm worth:-)

Christopher Walken in Communion (1989)

Let's just forget about those alien jokes and get on with this post, shall we?
I remember seeing the book 'Communion' on display in a book department in a major Australian store called Myer when the book first came out.
And like most readers, the cover is what drew my attention, and ultimately to the purchase of the book.
So, it wasn't like I was searching through a bookshelf of books in the back of some obscure bookstore, and this book just fell out at my feet.
The book was in a big display right at the front of the book department of a major chain store.
You couldn't miss it.
In fact, I don't even think I was in the book department when I noticed the display.
So, the book was being heavily marketed at the time and Strieber was the Stephen King of that era, you might say.
And the man who influenced PKD, David Bowie, was the star of 'The Hunger' in a recent adaption of one of Whitley's horror novels, just before the novel 'Communion' came out.

The movie that influenced PKD

PKD wrote this after seeing
'The Man Who Fell to Earth'

Those sunglasses make Bowie look alien?-)

But the alien face on the cover of 'Communion' wasn't all that unique for 1987, as ten years before we saw similar alien heads in the movie 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', and before that in the TV movie that was doing the rounds in the 70s about Betty and Barney Hill.
Fact, Fiction and UFOs?

Estelle Parsons in The UFO Incident (1975)

J. Allen Hynek in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'

So, the face on the cover of Strieber's book wasn't as unique as people like to think they remember:-) 
But that face drew people like me in to pick up the book and find out why a famous horror novelist of the time was claiming that this story was real.
You couldn't help thinking at the time that Whitley was either having a mental breakdown, or was playing it all up for the potential money to be made from writing such a book.
And when the movie came out it seemed like the mental breakdown was the more likely option here.

And to this day I still don't know what to make of Whitley's life experiences and alleged memories.
He certainly has been on a quest to make sense of it all by taking an interest in all things woo-woo.

My DVD copy of 'Communion'

I had to laugh when I saw that the DVD was a "Hen's Tooth Video" and that I had just looked up the day Whitley was born to find out he is a Gemini who was born in the Year of the Rooster to
the "Silent Generation":-)

The Twin Towers are the first things you see in the movie

Gemini is the sign of the twins, which makes that alien head hovering over the Twin Towers in the 80s on the movie poster a little eerie in hindsight, I think.

Two firefighters attending a false [flag]
fire alarm in room 303?-)

And on a personal synch note I was reading the back of the DVD cover and saw that the catalog number just happens to be the post code I lived in for the first 20 years of my life:-)

The film goes for 101 minutes, and I couldn't help thinking of Room 101 out of the novel '1984';-)

Room 101, introduced in the climax of the novel, is the basement torture chamber in the Ministry of Love, in which the Party attempts to subject a prisoner to their own worst nightmare, fear or phobia, with the object of breaking down their resistance.
You asked me once, what was in Room 101.

I told you that you knew the answer already.

Everyone knows it.

The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
— O'Brien, Part III, Chapter V

The guys in their movie review didn't mention the real Whitley and his son in the cameo in the art gallery near the end of the movie.

The real Whitley and his son in 'Communion'

But all in all, I enjoyed this movie review by the guys from the 'Somewhere in the Skies' podcast.
I'd like to hear them do a movie review of 'The Hunger' and 'Wolfen' and maybe 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' as well.
I've never listened to this podcast show before and decided to go right back to the first episode that featured Richard Dolan, pretty much three years to the day, and then I realized the podcast was named after the book Ryan wrote and Richard Dolan published.

Not that I have read the book, but I had heard Mike Clelland talk about it and Ryan before.
Ryan reminds me of a cross between Jack Nicholson and Ryan Gosling for some reason.
And it turns out as Ryan says in the first episode that Mike did the artwork for the podcast banner.

Mike now has a radio/podcast show called 'The Unseen' on Whitley Strieber's website, so it's a small synchy world it seems, considering the Powerful Owls are calling across the skies of my hometown of Brisbane right now, and that I just wrote a post featuring Mike and his owl theories yesterday -
Love Calls Ring Out in the Time of Social Isolation?

Might be time for me to blow the dust-off Mike's book that I bought years back and actually read it now?