Planeta extraño
1977 · 15m · España
Directed by Pedro Pérez Jiménez
Genres: dark comedy, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
In a bar far from everywhere, run and frequented by people not quite right in the head, an apparent extraterrestrial arrives who may or may not change their lives economically, sparking clashes over the money.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1977 Spanish sci-fi comedy about a maybe-alien crashing a dive bar full of broken people—it's genre refuse that somehow works, the kind of premise that should be insufferable but lands because it refuses to explain itself or pick a lane between satire and genuine weirdness.
Jiménez demonstrates formal control in how the film's absurdism remains tethered to spatial geography—the bar as pressure cooker—and there's a lineage here to Buñuel's grotesqueries and Latin American magical realism that the editing respects rather than overwhelms.
What elevates this from novelty is the decision to keep the extraterrestrial deliberately ambiguous and low-key; by refusing the spectacle one expects from the premise, Jiménez forces all tension into the ensemble's desperation around the money itself, making an alien invasion story that's actually about economics on a shoestring.