A decade before Independence Day and nearly as long before even Universal Soldier or Stargate, Roland Emmerich made a pair of odd family/comedy/horror hybrids. The first of these (and Emmerich’s second feature-length production, after his film school thesis project, The Noah’s Ark Principle, which showed at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival in 1981) was a movie called Joey, released in the States as Making Contact.

We’ll be showing Making Contact at the Stray Cat Film Center next month, representing the Class of 1985 in our ongoing Yearbook series. And I can’t wait. Because Making Contact might be the most bizarre movie we have shown yet.

Though made in Germany, Making Contact was filmed in English. In a July 1986 issue of Cinefantastique, Emmerich was quoted as saying, “I want to make entertaining movies for a broad audience. Germany needs a film industry again. Making ‘artsy’ movies may be nice for the ego, but it will not feed an industry. Enertaining the masses is the foundation, and that has been neglected here for a long time. People like Spielberg and Lucas are showing the way. Why shouldn’t we go in the same direction? We can do it too, and we can do it cheaper.”

That’s… a pretty succinct summary of Making Contact, which is basically like if you took all the movies Spielberg had released up to that point and put them in a blender along with a soupcon of Stephen King and my favorite evil ventriloquist dummy from all of cinema.

I’m not really here to talk about Making Contact, though, which is bizarre and wonderful and which we’ll be talking about plenty at Stray Cat in a few weeks.

In preparation for screening Making Contact, I finally got around to watching Emmerich’s next film, the zany 1987 comedy Ghost Chase, originally filmed and released in Germany (but also in English) as Hollywood Monster.

As weird as Making Contact is, Ghost Chase is almost impossible to summarize. We open with the youngest film crew in the world working on a slasher movie, where we are introduced to our three leads. These include two alumni from Night of the Creeps the year before, reuniting Jason Lively and Jill Whitlow, once again playing lead and love interest. Joining them is Fred, played by Tim McDaniel, who only has two other credits on Letterboxd, one of which is just listed as “Ice Cream Fight” in the movie Terminal Exposure.

The aspiring filmmakers are summoned to the reading of a will, where Lively’s character discovers that he has inherited from his grandfather a pawn shop ticket which, in turn, leads him to a suitcase containing, among other things, an old clock. Said clock also happens to be home to the spirit of his grandfather’s butler, who is, for no good reason, a weird little British Muppet named Louis.

After the ghostly presence causes Fred to have a prophetic dream, he builds an animatronic version of the Muppet butler, which the ghost occupies for the balance of the film. (It’s easy to see why the Letterboxd summary calls it an “alien.”) The ghost needs to get the kids to their inheritance, which his master had walled up with him in the basement of his old house. However, the house is now on the lot of a studio, which is owned by a scheming rich guy (naturally), played by veteran character actor and principal from The Breakfast Club Paul Gleason.

There are several other detours and cul-de-sacs, but that’s the gist. What follows it is mostly the kind of puerile comedy that you might expect – think the humor of Night of the Creeps but reduced by several notches.

It’s both more and less weird than Making Contact, and not quite as much fun, but it leaves one wondering… given how much Louis in this movie and the puppet Fletcher in Making Contact look like one another, where are all the pop-eyed, round-headed weirdo puppets in subsequent Roland Emmerich movies? Maybe he had gotten it out of his system after this…