A psych-101 Reddit thread drives the plot of David Guy Levy’s The Mandela Effect, referring to the phenomenon of “remembering” something that has never been true, whether it’s Curious George having a tail or the Monopoly man wearing a monocle. However insignificant these false pop-culture memories are in real life, they’re bestowed with literal life-or-death stakes in this screen telling.

Video game designer Brendan (Charlie Hofheimer, an alum of Levy’s Would You Rather) learns of the theory from his brother-in-law (Robin Lord Taylor, John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum). Perhaps because Brendan is grieving the drowning death of his daughter (Madeleine McGraw, Ant-Man and the Wasp), he latches onto the theory with an unhealthy fervor. Before long, he’s stalking a college professor (Outland’s Clarke Peters, obviously a Morgan Freeman stand-in) who believes Brendan is witnessing the result of alternate realities colliding, and whose quantum computer can allow them to alter the world’s “code” so they can bring the girl back to life. Or something like that.

Providing no shortage of Big Ideas, Levy and his Would You Rather collaborator Steffen Schlachtenhaufen have the makings of a Matrix-style head-tripper, but the pertinent information to transition into that all-important third act is delivered with such immediacy (as opposed to urgency) that the climax feels rushed — which truly may be the case, as the film clocks in at a brief 80 minutes, credits included. Had Brendan and the professor looked before they leapt, so to speak, The Mandela Effect might have resonated with its intended power. Lost in that sprint is a late subplot about the mental state of Brendan’s wife (Aleksa Palladino, The Irishman), although she does pop back up just long enough to contract what looks to be a medical condition known in the field as Jenga Face.

The fun of the film is all upfront, if viewers know to look for hidden-in-plain-sight examples of the Mandela effect before the narration alerts you to them; it’s like playing Life magazine’s Picture Puzzle feature, in which readers are challenged to spot the differences between two photos. With paranoia brewing stronger as the story progresses, one wonders what a director with demonstrated skill in this arena before — say, Pi’s Darren Aronofsky or Primer’s Shane Carruth — could do with it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

One of the earliest found-footage movies, if not the earliest, Dean Alioto’s no-budget The McPherson Tape purports to document one family’s encounter with extraterrestrials on an evening in the fall of 1983. Despite the title, this clan’s surname isn’t McPherson, but Van Heese. The night that changes their life happens to coincide with their celebration of a girl’s fifth birthday, thereby accounting for the constant use of the video camera.

The Tape’s strongest suit is that the cast members interact like a real family would at a paper-plate supper — gentle ribbing, overlapping conversations and all. Other than the two brothers — our ostensible leads — we witness more normal human behavior than we do acting. But — and this is rhetorical — how exciting is watching normal human behavior?

After that interminable dinner, unusual lights through the windows prompt the brothers to wander through the woods to see what’s what. From a distance, they spot a couple of alien life forms stepping off a landed spacecraft, or, in the words of one of the Van Heese boys, “a Martian or shit or somethin’!” Rightly fearing for their lives, they hightail it back to the house … until they decide to go back outside again. Among a power failure and the siblings hauling a dead alien inside (without affording us a glimpse), the family plays Go Fish and the matriarch voices her desire to watch Johnny Carson.

And so it goes (and goes and goes and …) until the literal last shot, when something interesting finally happens, giving us our first good look at the space invaders. It’s a letdown, however, because it’s nothing you can’t see answering the door every Oct. 31. An anal probe would elicit more emotion. In 1998, for Dick Clark Productions and the late, not-so-great UPN network, Alioto remade The McPherson Tape as Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County with less believability, but more tension and action, not to mention actual characters named McPherson. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When originally released, Deep Impact was, arguably, the better of the two killer-space-rock movies released that summer, the other being the Michael Bay-directed Armageddon.

But now, 20 years later, viewed through the stinging eyes of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become a once-hopeful film of a government that knows what it’s doing, a president who actually cares about people, and the world coming together in solidarity to defeat a deadly threat from outer space.

How times have changed.

In this 1998 disaster film, the comet is accidentally discovered by teenager Elijah Wood, then passed on to astronomer Charles Martin Smith, who is accidentally run off the road and killed in a fiery explosion. A year later, this rock — dubbed ELE, for extinction-level event — is discovered accidentally by Téa Leoni, back when America accidentally gave her a career.

As President Tom Beck (Morgan Freeman) soothes the nation with those dulcet, proto-Obama tones, a group of astronauts with the unlikely names of Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall), Oren Monash (Ron Eldard) and Dr. Gus Partenza (Jon Favreau) look to blow up the thing with nuclear missiles. Meanwhile, Wood marries his 15-year-old girlfriend (Leelee Sobieski).

When I originally viewed this in the theater, I was a bit bummed by how little destruction there actually was. But, watching it now, I’m actually impressed by the amount of scientific planning — fake or not — that went into the months of prepping before the actual aerial collision, and I believe that’s mostly thanks to director Mimi Leder and writers Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin.

So while Earth might not be affected by a comet the size of New York City anytime soon — dear God, I sure hope not — while under quarantine we can at least, collectively, watch this slow-burn sci-fi flick and dream about better times when the total immolation of our planet was the only thing we had to worry about. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

From Emilio Vieyra, director of The Curious Dr. Humpp, comes the arguably more bizarre Argentinian tale Stay Tuned for Terror, aka Strange Invasion, in which an entire town’s television sets suddenly go on the fritz. It all happens in Clearview — subtle, Señor Vieyra — where every channel of every TV starts broadcasting only a ’round-the-clock hypnotic pattern of waves, baffling authorities.

This is immediately met with the urgency of government response, shouting over the phone, screeching brakes, nosy reporters and fully suited men problem-solving in a board room as if this were Apollo 13 and not just housewives crying in vain, “Gimme my stories!”

Because children have no taste and will watch anything, Clearview’s kids remain transfixed by the signal, which renders them glassy-eyed and cataleptic — basically, the most emotionless kids this side of Midwich. Remove them from their perch in front of the tube and they fall ill and throw tantrums, much like today’s tots when the Wi-Fi signal goes down. As doctors and other experts theorize the signal’s origin and purpose, prepare to hear “diathermic” so often, you could make a drinking game out of it.

Unlike its cathode-ray threat, Stay Tuned for Terror is harmless speculative fiction, more fun in concept than in execution. Written by Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein, the duo behind Paul Bartel’s wonderfully warped Private Parts, the pic grows as repetitive as the Liberty Mutual jingle, but at 71 minutes, is mercifully brief. The message is perfectly simple; the meaning is clear: TV is a drug, so please, for the love of God and country, patronize the cinema. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

The paranoiac thriller Freaks — at least at first — has a wonderfully dark idea: A maniacally intense father (the disheveled Emile Hirsch) is keeping his small daughter (the mostly irritating Lexy Kolker) from going outside of their house, mostly for fear that the world will consider her a “freak” and imprison her inside a mountain compound.

As creepy neighbors — usually armed with melty ice cream cones — prowl around her house, it’s easy to think that Dad might be on to something here. But when her ice cream salesman grandfather (a wizened Bruce Dern) shows up, that’s when we learn the truth about the world — it’s some kind of a cheap superhero thing — and it’s really hard to care about any of it anymore.

The “freaks” tend to bleed from their eyes while displaying very cost-effective powers like super-speed, disappearing and telling people what to do, with a killer task force assigned to keep them under control and imprisoned, even though it’s apparently one officer and a hard-nosed agent (Grace Park).

The film was obviously made to cash in on the crop of recent superhero movies — mostly of the mutant variety — which I can understand, but as long as Marvel and DC are pumping these things out on a regular basis, why even bother? Why choose store-brand cereal if you can afford Froot Loops? Why choose Freaks when you can choose X-Men: Dark Phoenix?

Okay, bad example. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.