Episode Summary

This week on The 80s Movie Podcast, host Edward Havens looks at one of the strangest and most overlooked sci-fi comedies of the decade: UFOria (also released as Uforia), a film written and directed by John Binder and starring Fred Ward, Harry Dean Stanton, and Cindy Williams. Shot in 1981 but delayed for years due to studio uncertainty and marketing difficulties, the film eventually trickled out into limited release before disappearing into near-obscurity. Set in a small American town where con men, revival preachers, and lonely dreamers collide, UFOria follows a drifting hustler who becomes entangled with a faith-healing scam and a supermarket clerk convinced she is destined to witness a UFO encounter. What unfolds is part romance, part satire, and part small-town philosophical comedy wrapped around a genuinely unusual sci-fi premise. Edward explores the film’s unusually long journey from production to release, its struggles to find a distributor, and why its mix of grounded character drama and UFO mythology has earned it a small but devoted cult following. Plus: how performances from Fred Ward and Harry Dean Stanton helped elevate a film that might otherwise have been lost entirely to time.
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