The Return (1980) User Reviews

The most memorable things about this one is the weapon the one guy had

[Aaron1375 · 3/10 · 31 July 2009]

This movie is one of those obscure films that most people in the world probably have never seen and probably should not bother trying to find unless they like to laugh at poor cinema. It is akin to the film Laserblast, only that one is more well known due to the fact it was played more back in the day and would later become riffed on the cult television show Mystery Science Theater 3000. This one, too, could have been on that show and made a rather good episode as it is just ripe for the riffing! Instead, it became a film most have never seen or heard of even though there are several decent actors in this one including Jean Michael Vincent, Raymond Burr, Martin Landeau and Cybil Shepard. However, they could not make up for the fact that this movie seems to almost have not discernible plot...

The story, what little there is, starts out with two kids and a prospector encountering strange lights in the sky and they are seemingly imbued with something or another. The little girl was just passing through, but the little boy lived in town. Years later, they are all grown up and in the town where the encounter took place strange occurrences have happened as cows have been mutilated. The boy is now a deputy and drinking beer while pursuing annoying young folk driving while the girl now works for her dad's vague institute that seems to be exploring space and possible aliens, but are not experts on cow mutilations. Well the prospector is now wielding a lightsaber and carving up cows for some purpose and soon the former kids will have to confront him!

The film seems like it was trying to do both Star Wars and Close Encounters with a touch of horror thrown into the mix. It could've worked, but it takes itself way too seriously. They needed more of the horror element as watching drunk deputy and pretty new girl in town interact throughout the movie got very tiresome. So instead of being entertaining like those two movies, it is only really entertaining as a film to be made fun of as you are watching it unfold.

One Mutilated Cow a Day Keeps the Alien Away?

[Coventry · 5/10 · 22 August 2010]

Here's (yet another) obscure and low-budgeted early 80's Sci-Fi movie about alien invasion in a remote little South-Western redneck town. Hooray! No, seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. I love this stuff and "The Return" particularly caught my attention because of its director and the names involved in the cast. Greydon Clark is a sadly overlooked genre director who made some really diverge films, like the slasher parody "Wacko" and the sleazy devil-worshiping flick "Satan's Cheerleaders". Around at the same time he did "The Return", Greydon Clark also directed the slightly better and much more exciting "Without Warning"; which actually can be considered as a primitive but clever forerunner to "Predator". The cast list of "The Return" is more than impressive, at least if you're a sucker for B-movie heroes and heroines. Jan-Michael Vincent, back when he was still rebelliously handsome and relatively sober, forms a wonderful team with the unearthly cute Cybill Shepherd from "The Last Picture Show" and "Taxi Driver". The supportive cast is even better, as it features names like Martin Landau, Raymond Burr, Neville Brand and Vincent Schiavelli! With all these names involved, I couldn't care less if the rating is only a miserable 2.3 out of ten.

Now, "The Return" may be a bad film in the end, but it's definitely more ambitious and profound than its clumsy elaboration suggests. Personally, I like to believe that Greydon Clark originally intended for his film to be far more horror-orientated, but that the screenplay was "softened" in favor to cash in on some contemporary really popular family/fantasy themed Sci-Fi classics, like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Star Wars". The only true horror elements that remained are a crazed hillbilly yokel killing to endorse his extraterrestrial masters and good old-fashioned cattle mutilation. Lots and lots of cattle mutilation! Twenty-five years ago, two young children witnessed a spaceship passing over a small little town in New Mexico. Nobody believed them but now the little town's area causes awkward strange satellite measuring and plenty of dead cow carcasses are floating down the rivers. Jennifer Kramer travels to Little Creek to investigate and teams up with the skeptical deputy Wayne, much against the will of the hostile cattle breeders who are clearly very fond of their cows. This is illustrated through incredibly banal dialogs like: "When I see the mutilated cadavers of my daddy's cows … it makes my heart bleed". Anyway, Jennifer and Wayne gradually realize they met each other 25 years earlier already, and now they fear that whatever force marked them as young children has returned now. What they don't know, however, is that the spaceship also shed a light on a crazy hermit all those years ago, and he just might be a little too overenthusiastic to satisfy his alien masters.

"The Return" doesn't make a whole lot of sense most of the time, but the film is never boring and there are a handful of highly memorable sequences. Especially during the first hour, Greydon Clark manages to maintain an admirable ambiance of mystery and spookiness. The cattle mutilation footage is well handled and the film does a fairly good job depicting the increasing paranoia amongst the petrified villagers. Still, "The Return" remains mostly enjoyable because of the little details of incompetence all throughout the film. Martin Landau's Sheriff character, for example, is a senselessly murmuring idiot who adds absolutely nothing to the plot and Jan-Michael Vincent does his patrolling with a beer bottle behind the wheel. The cow massacres are done with a miniature light-saber and, near the end, there are some fantastically cheesy sound and lightening effects to illustrate that the aliens have landed. This is a dumb and forgettable movie for about 98% of the world population, but for us 2% die-hard cult smut fanatics, it's guaranteed good fun.

There is no answer ......

[merklekranz · 5/10 · 23 October 2018]

" The Return" views like a puzzle that is impossible to solve. It features some intriguing actors including, Neville Brand, Martin Landau, and Vincent Schiavelli, in supporting roles. A small New Mexico town is visited by aliens, putting on a light show. Two children and Schiavelli, are "contacted" for an unknown purpose. Fast forward twenty five years when Cybil Shepherd and Jan Michael Vincent, are enlightened that they were the two chosen children. Chosen for what is of course unknown. Meanwhile Neville Brand, playing a local rancher, is dealing with cattle mutilations, that he blames on scientist Shepherd. Raymond Burr, Shepherd's Father, deduces that the aliens left some sign carved on a rock for an unknown purpose. "The Return" is a movie asking all questions while revealing zero answers, and is a very frustrating viewing experience. - MERK

You Won't Want to Return to This Mess!

[Zantara Xenophobe · 2/10 · 1 June 2001]

WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS. Do not read if you don't want some points revealed to you before you watch the film.

With a cast like this, you wonder whether or not the actors and actresses knew exactly what they were getting into. Did they see the script and say, `Hey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was such a hit that this one can't fail.' Unfortunately, it does. Did they even think to check on the director's credentials? I mean, would YOU do a movie with the director of a movie called `Satan's Cheerleaders?' Greydon Clark, who would later go on to direct the infamous `Final Justice,' made this. It makes you wonder how the people of Mystery Science Theater 3000 could hammer `Final Justice' and completely miss out on `The Return.'

The film is set in a small town in New Mexico. A little boy and girl are in the street unsupervised one night when a powerful flashlight beam.er.a spaceship appears and hovers over them. In probably the worst special effect sequence of the film, the ship spews some kind of red ink on them. It looked like Clark had held a beaker of water in from of the camera lens and dipped his leaky pen in it, so right away you are treated with cheese. Anyhow, the ship leaves and the adults don't believe the children. Elsewhere, we see Vincent Schiavelli, whom I find to be a terrific actor (watch his scenes in `Ghost' for proof, as they are outstanding), who is playing a prospector, or as I called him, the Miner 1949er. He steps out of the cave he is in, and he and his dog are inked by the ship. Twenty-five years go by, and the girl has grown up to be Cybill Shepherd, who works with her father, Raymond Burr, in studying unusual weather phenomena. Or something like that. Shepherd spots some strange phenomena in satellite pictures over that little New Mexico town, and she travels there to research it. Once she gets there, the local ranchers harass her, and blame her for the recent slew of cattle mutilations that have been going on, and deputy Jan-Michael Vincent comes to her rescue. From this point on, the film really drags as the two quickly fall for each other, especially after Vincent wards off the locals and informs Shepherd that he was the little boy that saw the ship with her twenty-five years earlier. While this boring mess is happening, Vincent Schiavelli, with his killer dog at his side, is walking around killing the cattle and any people he runs into with an unusual item. You know those glowing plastic sticks stores sell for trick-or-treaters at Halloween, the kind that you shake to make them glow? Schiavelli uses what looks like one of those glow sticks to burn incisions in people. It's the second-worst effect in the movie. Every time Schiavelli is on screen with the glow stick, the scene's atmosphere suddenly turns dark, like the filmmakers thought the glow stick needed that enhancement. It ends up making the movie look even cheaper than it is.

And what does all this lead up to? It's hard to tell when the final, confusing scene arrives. See, Burr and his team of scientists try to explain the satellite images that Shepherd found as some kind of `calling card,' but none of it makes sense. Why do Shepherd and Vincent age and Schiavelli does not? Schiavelli explains why he is killing cattle and people and why he wants Shepherd dead, but even that doesn't make much sense when you really think about it. I mean, why doesn't he kill Jan-Michael Vincent? After all, he had twenty-five years to do it. And the aliens won't need him if Shepherd is dead anyhow, so why try to kill her? Speaking of the aliens, it is never clear what they really wanted out of Shepherd and Vincent. What is their goal? Why do they wait so long to intervene? How could they be so sure Shepherd would come back? Not that the answer to any of these and other questions would have made `The Return' any more pleasant. You would still have bad lines, really bad acting, particularly by Shepherd, cheesy effects, and poor direction. Luckily, the stars escaped from this movie. Cybill Shepherd soon went on to star in `Moonlighting' with Bruce Willis. Jan-Michael Vincent went on to be featured in dozens of B-movies, often in over-the-top parts. Raymond Burr made a pile of Perry Mason television movies right up until his death. Vincent Schiavelli went on to be a great character actor in a huge number of films. Martin Landau, who played a kooky law enforcement officer, quickly made the terrific `Alone in the Dark' and the awful `The Being' before rolling into the films he has been famous for recently. You can bet none of these stars ever want their careers to return to `The Return.' Zantara's score: 2 out of 10.

At least Cybill Shepherd looked good

[vchimpanzee · 27 September 2005]

Jennifer has come to a small New Mexico town to set up geological monitoring equipment for her father's organization. Some of the townspeople find her behavior suspicious. And she gets attacked several times by a vicious but mysterious dog. Several ranchers have lost cattle that were not only killed but mutilated, and cults or perhaps aliens are blamed because there are no flies or anything.

Dr. Kramer, Jennifer's father, comes to the town wanting to know more about what is going on. The ranchers, including the independent and stubborn Walt, resent people who know nothing about cattle butting into the situation. Meanwhile, Deputy Wayne seems to like Jennifer.

Later, people are found mutilated as well as cattle. The first time it happens, a weird looking man shows up carrying what looks like the light sabers from the 'Star Wars' movies, only it is held in the middle.

Shepherd did a good job as an actress here, but mostly she just looked beautiful. I'm used to seeing her look like, say, Martha Stewart these days. Raymond Burr seemed like Perry Mason at times, but in other scenes he and all the other actors seemed like they were reading their lines. I'm thinking particularly of a scene back at his headquarters where the scientists were explaining their theories.

I didn't find this movie particularly scary, except when the dog was on screen, and in scenes close to the end. That's okay because I don't like scary. The violence was not all that bad, though we did see blood. The special effects were not that great, though we got to see what looked like a portal into another dimension several times. It looked like the kind of modern art people often hate if they want realism. It was pretty to look at, anyway--sort of like a purple 'black hole'.

The ending was weird but satisfying in a way, though I couldn't help but feel someone cheated because they couldn't find their way out of the mess they had gotten into.

I've seen better mysteries.

Close Encounter of the cheap kind

[bkoganbing · 2/10 · 19 April 2016]

Two children who grow up to be Jan-Michael Vincent and Cybill Shepherd have a close encounter with an alien spaceship. Twenty five years later they reunite as some strange things are happening in the small New Mexico town where Vincent is now part of law enforcement and Shepherd is now a scientist.

The Return is a ripoff of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind only it was done on the budget that that science fiction classic spent on its catering. We learn here that Raymond Burr who plays Shepherd's father was so bored with the whole thing that he read his lines off a teleprompter. I can't blame him, the whole thing bored me as well.

The term worm hole had not been given to us courtesy of Star Trek - The Next Generation. But that's what Burr and Shepherd and the rest of the scientists have monitored and that's why Shepherd is back to investigate. I still haven't figured out just what it was there for.

The rest of the cast took Raymond Burr's somnambulist approach to the film. It can put anyone to sleep even the players.

Basically a string of random events...

[paul_haakonsen · 3/10 · 10 February 2023]

I had actually never heard about this sci-fi thriller titled "The Return" from 1980. I stumbled upon the movie by random chance here in 2023, and while I am not overly keen on sci-fi movies in general, then I still opted to watch "The Return", as I sat it had Cybill Shepherd and Jan-Michael Vincent on the cast list.

Writers Ken Wheat, Jim Wheat and Curtis Burch didn't exactly manage to put together an overwhelmingly interesting or entertaining script for the movie. I was rather bored throughout the 91 minutes that the movie trotted on for; especially since everything felt random and didn't have much of any red thread to.

The acting performances in the movie were fair enough. Nothing grand, though.

The special effects in "The Return" were nothing spectacular. There were some effects, and some actually played out well enough, while others were dubious at best.

I am sure that die-hard sci-fi fans could get a kick out of watching "The Return". But me, as a casual viewer, didn't find much enjoyment in director Greydon Clark's 1980 movie.

My rating of "The Return" lands on a three out of ten stars.

For a Greydon Clark movie, it could have been much worse.

[Otkon · 4/10 · 29 March 2020]

In fact, the cheesiness of the whole thing lends itself quite well to the overall alien encounter stuff.

Nothing is really explained. Some odd things happen. It never really drags.

And it is not the low point in the career of any of the cast. So it has that going for it.

Great actors dragged through hell

[BandSAboutMovies · 2/10 · 13 December 2019]

Graydon Clark. We have him to thank for Satan's Cheerleaders, Without Warning, Wacko and many more.

Here he brings together Cybil Shepherd and Jan-Michael Vincent as a couple that were taken by aliens as children. Yes, the romance is anything but torrid, but sometimes, we work with what we've got.

While stopping at a gas station late one night, a young girl on vacation and a local boy are taken by a UFO.

Twenty-five years later, that boy is the sheriff of that town, Wayne (Vincent). There have been several cattle mutilations in town, which brings Jennifer (Shepherd), a scientist in to help. Of course, she's the girl from the beginning.

It turns out that the cows are getting all messed up because the aliens also visited a prospector (Vincent Schiavelli!) who has been using an energy knife to slice up the bovines and send them into space using a teleporter the extraterrestrials left behind.

Somehow, this movie was able to acquire the star power of Martin Landau, Raymond Burr and Neville Brand. In her book Cybill Disobedience: How I Survived Beauty Pageants, Elvis, Sex, Bruce Willis, Lies, Marriage, Motherhood, Hollywood, and the Irrepressible Urge to Say What I Think, Shepherd said that the cast was "a rather sad group of actors, all trying to resurrect our diminished careers. Raymond Burr read his lines off a TelePrompter."

But wait - there's more! Darby Hinton, yes, the star of Malibu Express, also makes an appearance, as does Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 1977 Susan Kiger, who also appeared in Andy Sidaris' Seven.

Can you believe who is in this bad movie

[Jackbv123 · 4/10 · 17 August 2017]

The overall story isn't bad, but the details are ridiculous.

4 cowboys try to beat up the lady scientist, Jennifer, and the deputy marshal catches them in the act and they just get to walk away. Maybe that's the way things were done back then. Two federal agents shoot at the town marshal for no valid reason unless it was that their bosses told them to assassinate Jennifer and Wayne. The Prospector goes around mutilating cows in order to "scare away" Jennifer, but then he resorts to mutilating humans. And don't ask me what the end was all about.

I guess the director thought he had to mimic Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the way he used lights and musical tones.

Given who the actors are, the acting is bad. Maybe it was the direction. Martin Landau is just silly. Raymond Burr plays just like all the stories we know him in like Perry Mason. Cybill Shepherd and Jan-Michael Vincent are mostly stiff. All the minor players are way over-the-top, especially the cowboys.

There isn't much to recommend this, but if you can put up with all the detail junk, you might suffer through it for the overall story.

A lovely little UFO and SiFi flick, just don't expect too much from it.

[David_Habert · 4/10 · 9 January 2014]

Many years ago during the early 80s, my dad hired this movie from a local video store. All I remembered about this film was a little girl and boy encountering a UFO flying above there heads encasing them in a strange light. But oddly enough, that was all I could remember of it.

It wasn't until five years ago that I heard about this film and was wondering if this was the same movie that I saw years before in the 80s. It turned out that it was and wanted to see it again.

I've recently managed to get hold of a copy and I'm glad I did. Because although special effects wise it's not brilliant. But it does have a good story which is why I gave it a 4 out of 10 rating. If I was basing this movie just on special effects alone, I would have given it a 2 out of 10.

The basic story centres on two young children who as I said earlier encounter a UFO. But 25 years later the girl played by Cybill Shepherd who is a scientist comes to a small town doing some research and meets up with a deputy sheriff of the town played by Jan-Michael Vincent. But later on discover that they have a lot more in common than they realised.

In truth when Cybill's character Jennifer discovers that this was the same town where she had her encounter, she then tells Jan-Michael Vincent's character Wayne about her encounter and that nobody would believe her. Wayne then says that no one believed him either and she then realises that he was the little boy she met that night.

I did feel that the story got ruined when it introduced cattle mutilations, then later on human murders and mutilations as this made the movie extremely far fetched. The writers should have stuck to the original idea of Jennifer and Wayne trying to solve the puzzle of there UFO encounter.

So for a movie in general, don't expect too much. With it being made during the early 80s it is very dated and doesn't hold up to the test of time. Where special effects is concerned, I give it a thumbs down. (I suspect that was due to the budget constraints they had while making it, it's not a Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Star Wars Clone)

But where the story is concerned, It's OK. I would have given it a thumbs up if it wasn't for the introduction of cattle mutilations and human murders and mutilations.

I must say that I admire Wayne's literature in this film, because just like him I also have a strong interest in the paranormal and UFOs, I've been studying this subject ever since I was a little kid and I still do to this day.

Goofy, but enjoyable low-budget sci-fi oddity

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 11 June 2014]

Boy, does this film comes across as quite a disjointed mess, but it's the very murky nature of the cloudy narrative that makes it such a dippy hoot. The story goes something like this: Two kids and an adult in a tiny rural hamlet have an run-in with a spaceship. Twenty-five years later the kids are reunited as adults. Meanwhile, a puzzling series of cattle mutilations plague the area that take on a much more sinister aura when people start to get gruesomely murdered too.

Director Greydon Clark, working from a muddled, yet still interesting script by Jim & Ken Wheat and Curtis Burch, relates the entertainingly convoluted and oftentimes confounding story at a steady pace, does a sound job of crafting an intriguing mysterious atmosphere, neatly captures the sleepy nature of small town American existence, and delivers a decent smidgen of gore along with a ridiculously from out of left field car chase and exploding automobiles for good lurid measure.

The earnest acting by the sturdy cast helps a lot: Jan-Michael Vincent as rugged deputy Wayne and the positively ravishing Cybill Shepherd as sassy scientist Jennifer make for appealing and attractive leads, Neville Brand growls it up with lip-smacking brio as crusty rancher Walt, Martin Landau makes a likable impression as amiable good ol' boy marshal Niles Buchanan, Vincent Schiavelli contributes a perfectly creepy turn as a crazed prospector brandishing a lethal light saber-like weapon, and Raymond Burr lends his commanding presence as Jennifer's stern father Dr. Kramer. Popping up in colorful smaller parts are Brad Reardon as Walt's spoiled brat son Eddie, Darby Hinton as jerky ranch hand Darren, Playboy Playmate Susan Kiger as an ill-fated blonde babe, and Greydon Clark in an uncredited bit as a bumbling city slicker. Daniel Pearl's glossy cinematography provides an impressive polished look. Dan Wyman's harmonic score hits the snazzy spot. The gaudy (not so) special effects possess a certain groovy psychedelic charm. Granted, we're not talking work of art here, but it's fun enough in a distinctly loopy Grade B sort of way.

Weird but passable little movie.

[Hey_Sweden · 6/10 · 20 December 2013]

"The Return" has to rank as one of the lesser efforts of veteran cult director Greydon Clark. It's not that it's all THAT incompetent, but a weak script, co-written by brothers Ken and Jim Wheat ("The Silent Scream", "Pitch Black") prevents it from working all that well. The audience is going to end up scratching their heads while they try to make some sense out of the strange goings-on. As for the rest, it's all just silly and cheesy enough to rate as acceptable B movie entertainment. This reviewer knows that he throws out the word "amusing" an awful lot, but there's really no other way to describe this thing. And it's that amusement factor that manages to keep this watchable.

The actors are remarkably sincere. Jan-Michael Vincent and Cybill Shepherd star as Wayne and Jennifer, a deputy in a small New Mexico town and hottie scientist respectively, who as children had had a close encounter. Also witness to the aliens' arrival was a prospector (the late, great character actor Vincent Schiavelli, one of those people who you always recognize but whose name you may never remember). The kids grow up, of course, but Schiavelli remains the same age. Shepherds' character gets wind of strange fog activity in this small town and soon after she gets there cattle begin to be mutilated. Then, people get mutilated as well.

Things take a pretty goofy turn when a character is seen to carry around a lightsaber type weapon, except it's held in the middle. Add to this a light show that is actually fairly impressive as well as some decent makeup effects and solid rural atmosphere, and the viewer gets what amounts to a mild hoot of a movie. Also in the cast are Martin Landau, who's wasted as Vincents' comedy-relief sheriff, Raymond Burr as Shepherds' father, who looks like he's reading his lines at times (and indeed he was), Neville Brand as a hostile rancher, Brad Rearden (who'd acted in "The Silent Scream") as Brands' bratty son, and Clark regular Darby Hinton ("Malibu Express") as one of Reardens' trouble making pals. Undeniable assets are cinematography by Daniel Pearl ("The Texas Chain Saw Massacre") and nice music by Dan Wyman.

Clark also did the well regarded "Without Warning" that was released the same year as this, and that one is recommended more than "The Return", which even B movie enthusiasts might find underwhelming.

Clark appears on screen as a city slicker victim.

Six out of 10.

could have been better

[KostaF64 · 5/10 · 5 April 2018]

The story of the two children who have an encounter with an extraterrestrial spaceship in a small town and 25 years later the children meet again is good and could have been developed in a better way, but as it is, the film is an eyesore.

"Hold On To Your Pants, Everybody!"...

[azathothpwiggins · 6 November 2019]

THE RETURN stars Cybill Shepherd and Jan Michael-Vincent as adults who meet again, years after a childhood incident involving extraterrestrial activity. Jennifer (Shepherd) is now a scientist, and Wayne (Jan-Michael Vincent) is a lawman who enjoys shooting car stereos. Events lead the duo to remember what happened to them that fateful night.

Jennifer's dad (Raymond Burr) arrives in town, pontificating furiously due to a local cattle mutilation epidemic. Enter rancher / hot head, Walt (Neville Brand), who yells a lot in a gruff voice. This man definitely knows his cows!

Simultaneously, the sheriff (Martin Landau) is on the case, while trying to figure out how to dunk doughnuts in a can of beer. Could alien mischief be behind all this? Can Waynifer figure things out, before the sheriff dunks his first doughnut? And, what about the peculiar prospector, his mini- light saber, and his devil dog? And, why does he have a black hole in his cave? Annnd, just why did Wayne drive his motorcycle through that window, in slow-motion? Was Mr. Vincent symbolically recreating his final scene from WHITE LINE FEVER?

Regardless, this is one hilariously funny movie, and you will believe! In aliens? No, in the power of love, doughnuts, light sabers, Raymond Burr, and the ability to float elegantly in black holes!...

UFOs, Romance, Action & Psychedelic Special Effects

[vchaser · 8/10 · 30 May 2016]

Cybil & Jan-Michael are great in this weirdly fun movie. Cybil is gorgeous & sassy; Jan-Michael is sexy & cool. They had good chemistry together. I enjoyed watching their attraction grow into a romantic liaison. Jan-Michael was good in the action scenes. Supposed to take place near Alamogordo NM but was actually filmed in CA. The NM location makes a connection to the Roswell incident. Had just enough UFO/unexplained activity going on to hold my attention. Parts of it are corny but Raymond Burr adds some authority to help it along. I like 50s style movies & this reminded me of that era only with psychedelic special effects. Is free on Amazon Prime.

Cattle mutilations.

[HumanoidOfFlesh · 6/10 · 17 February 2011]

Twenty-five years ago three people in a small town had an encounter with a UFO.Today all three people find themselves back in a small rural town.A local cop.A female scientist.A hermit who enjoys mutilating and killing cows."The Return" by Greydon Clark is nowhere nearly as suspenseful and memorable as "Without Warning".The plot often doesn't make sense and there are some dull sequences.The cast is pretty familiar with Martin Landau,Vincent Schiavelli,Jan Michael Vincent and Raymond Burr to boost.Unfortunately their performances are mostly weak and forgettable.The cattle mutilation sub-plot is a nice touch,though.Overall,"The Return" is watchable but generally speaking I personally think there are much better sci-fi horror films out there.6 cattle mutilations out of 10.

Enuf to make a grown man cry! (Beware spoilers.)

[Rankin-44 · 16 May 2002]

So much potential! A multi-star cast including Cybill Shepherd, Jan-Michael Vincent, Raymond Burr, Neville Brand, Martin Landau & Vincent Schiavelli! A dyn-o-mite premise: alien visitation, cattle mutilation all mixed in with car-chases, gun-play, a love story, mean folk, weird goings on and special-effects to boot.

From these great expectations, things go rapidly down-hill.

The lighting is mostly abysmally dark and very unprofessional. The script might be a good first effort for a jock middle-schooler taking a dreaded English-course requirement. The special effects sucked. Whoever edited the film seems to have repeatedly cut to new footage whenever he got bored. Those responsible should be ashamed of themselves - and probably were, since "The Return" was aka "Alien's Return" & "Earthright".

Which leaves the question as to why such a seasoned cast would embarrass themselves with such a flawed production. The only reason I can think of is - blackmail.

Now THAT would make an interesting film...

~ Rankin!

Check it out! Cybill Shephard with a light-saber!!!!!!!!

[robespierre9 · 6/10 · 14 June 2008]

OK, this movie is at least good for some eye candy. Jan Michael Vincent is one of my favorite actors, and he makes any role interesting in my opinion! I enjoyed this 'B' movie for the fact that Jan is in this (although it looks as if he's visibly bored and intoxicated during most of the filming!), and of course Cybil Shephard is always entertaining. It actually was a pretty good 'B' movie considering! At least it does not try to 'explain' too much about the cow-mutilations, etc. It let's you make up your own mind at the end. There are granted some pretty funny moments in this - some of them are cringe-worthy. Check out the double-sided light-saber which appears later on in the movie! The UFO lights are pretty cool too. Martin Landau overacts in this. Also, the actor Vincent Schiavelli plays one of the UFO 'victims'. He was also great in the X Files episode "HumBug" as the man with the 'attached' brother. Anyway, well, worth the buy if you want to see JMV, Cybil, X files character actors, or a pretty silly B movie about UFO's!

Better Than I Expected

[Michael_Elliott · 7 April 2018]

The Return (1982)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Jennifer (Cybill Shepherd) is a scientist who goes to a small New Mexico town after seeing some bizarre images. Once there she begins to notice that a few things aren't quite right and she teams up with the Deputy Wayne (Jan-Michael Vincent). At first some strange cattle mutilations are happening but before long humans are being killed and it all might be connected to something Jennifer and Wayne witnessed as children.

Despite a terrific cast, Greydon Clark's THE RETURN has pretty much been forgotten and overlooked. It was certainly an attempt to try and cash-in on the sci-fi boom that took off after the success of Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and I think this film was meant to try and be in the same league. With that said, there's no question that they were dealing with a very small budget here that prevented that but on the whole THE RETURN was more entertaining than I thought it would be.

The film certainly has some flaws and I will start with them. This includes the ending, which I won't spoil here but I think it fell well short of the emotional punch that the director was going for. I'd also argue that the film started to drag during the final twenty-minutes, which was another problem. The special effects certainly aren't as good as one would hope for but considering the budget this here can be forgiven. With all of that being said, the film does start off pretty strong and hold your attention throughout most of it.

I thought the cattle mutilation sub-plot was actually interesting and it was done in a good manor. I liked how the townspeople, backwards rednecks, were more worried about the scientist and their dumb fears that she was the ones killing the cows. We get some very familiar faces here so this also helps hold your attention throughout. Vincent and Shepherd make for a good team but we also get veteran actors like Martin Landau, Raymond Burr and Neville Brand. Vincent Schiavelli, the one and only, also appears in a good role.

I'm sure a higher budget would have allowed the film to do a bit more but if you look at THE RETURN the same way you would the "B" sci-fi movies of the 1950s then you should find enough to keep you entertained.

Send out the light and the truth ...let them lead - Psalm 43:3

[Bernie4444 · 7/10 · 31 March 2024]

This is not an abduction story. A couple of kids and an old miner were scanned by some lights in the sky.

Twenty-five years later they were compelled by curiosity to return. The story is that of the return and what the locals made of the returning signs.

This movie has very primitive writing and acting. There are no expensive props or CGI. This movie has gawd awful background music. Makes you want to use closed caption.

Who cares if we ignore the music? The fun is watching the story unfold is enough. Kibitzing allowed.

I watched this mainly to see the late Martin Landau in a different character.

When I saw Raymond Burr all I could think of was "Godzilla."