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In UFOria (1985), Cindy Williams predates Zooey Deschanel’s quirky-girl schtick as Arlene, a grocery-store clerk whose deep religiousness morphs into a messianic complex after she has a dream suggesting a UFO is coming to her small town. When she wakes up, she concludes she’s not a lot different than Noah. If she doesn’t warn people en masse of the coming visit, she figures anything bad that happens (which her visions don’t confirm) is on her hands. 

Arlene gets some help spreading the word from Brother Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a garden-variety grifter who’s leveled up recently into sham-priesthood, and Sheldon (Fred Ward), another con man and friend of Bud’s who rolls into town as the film opens (he’s a committed drifter) and quickly falls for Arlene after she catches him shoplifting at her store. The men see dollars, though, and that naturally upsets our would-be savior. Arlene truly looks at herself as a kind of chosen one, and to capitalize financially on that in any way would only tarnish the saintliness of her role.

UFOria, which can at times feel adjacent to Jonathan Demme movies like Melvin and Howard (1980) or Something Wild (1986) with its eccentric naturalism, was shot in 1981 but wasn’t released until 1985. You can see why. It’s not that it’s so terrible — though I think Williams’ gauche dizzy-woman-trying-to-find-existential-meaning routine increasingly is — but because it’s such an odd, dispensable-feeling trifle. 

It’s hard to market — its comedy is inoffensively oddball but rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and the sci-fi elements are more decorative than essential — and, though mostly pleasant to watch, has a hard time inspiring a very strong reaction. (Roger Ebert, who gave the movie four stars and particularly appreciated the film’s offer of a wholly unique premise, would disagree with me, along with a handful of other prominent critics of the time whose enthusiasm wasn’t matched by most audiences.) I’ll immediately forget UFOria, though I’m sure I’ll remember the joy I felt first seeing character-actor greats Stanton and Ward not just in the same movie but seated at its front, for once not confined to the thankless background of a better movie.