Put “The Goonies,” “E.T.,” “Close Encounters” and “War of the Worlds” in that blender from “Gremlins” — and transport the mixture back to 1979 in the “Back to the Future” DeLorean — and you get J.J. Abrams’ “Super 8.” It’s an enjoyable, well-acted, old-school geekfest pitting a group of middle-school students against an escaped monster from outer space.
The fun starts with one of the few references to a film not involving Steven Spielberg, who serves as a producer here.
Our young, undersupervised heroes are filming a cheesy zombie movie one night at a closed Ohio train station when they are nearly flattened by a train wreck straight out of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
MORE: WATCH THE SPECTACULAR TRAIN CRASH SEQUENCE
‘SUPER 8’ — SLOW LEAVING THE STATION?
Actually, this derailment easily tops that one, and it unleashes a scary, spider-like creature that Abrams wisely only shows in brief glimpses until well into the movie. (Let’s just say Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien” eventually comes to mind.) The creature was being transported by rail (for reasons never remotely explained) by the Air Force, which forces the evacuation of the town while it searches for the escaped extraterrestrial.
The kids’ science teacher (Glynn Turman), whose car was involved in the derailment, warns them to tell nobody about what they saw (and recorded on film — a reference to “Blow Up” and “Blow Out”). Which, at first, is fine with the teens, who are mostly just interested in finishing their little movie (the title refers to an archaic amateur film format) anyway.
At least they are until the movie’s female lead — middle-school cutie Elle Fanning, whose dad’s convertible is miraculously left more or less unscratched by the accident — gets abducted by the rampaging creature.
I’m not going to get into any more of the unsurprising plot, except to mention black-and-white movies shot at Area 54. But it goes without saying that while the nominal setting may be the Rust Belt instead of Southern California, the film is still recognizably set in the emotional confines of Spielbergland.
It’s told through the eyes of an excellent newcomer, Joel Courtney, whose character’s mother has died in a steel-mill accident four months earlier. He has an uneasy relationship with his father (top-billed Kyle Chandler), a deputy sheriff who comes into conflict with the scary Air Force officer (Noah Emmerich) conducting the search.
The filmmaking crew is headed by the husky and pushy Riley Griffiths (an apparent stand-in for Spielberg to Courtney’s J.J. Abrams), who yells “production value” when he sees the oncoming freight train and rushes to get it into the background of his film.
Griffiths had hoped to use the project to get acquainted with the character played by Fanning, who gives a star-making performance as the spunky heroine. She is nicely abetted by Ron Eldard as her drunken single father, who feels responsibility for the death of Courtney’s mother.
Abrams, who directed the underrated “Star Trek” reboot, does a great job with the family scenes, as well as the nascent romance between Fanning and Courtney, who handles makeup and special effects for the film-within-a-film.
Metal-mouthed scene-stealer Ryan Lee, who likes to blow things up, is the group’s future Michael Bay, and Gabriel Basso is their awkward leading man.
Besides Richard Donner’s Spielberg-produced “The Goonies,” the scenes with the kids most directly recall Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me.” If your movie has to be derivative, there are certainly worse models.
If you’re familiar with Spielberg’s work, though, it’s nearly impossible to watch Abrams’ film without forgetting this is a conscious, and occasionally self-conscious, homage to the master.
A scene with a power lineman immediately summoned up “Close Encounters” for me, and the 9/11-style bulletin board with notices about missing dogs is straight out of “War of the Worlds.”
Which is not to say I didn’t have a good time at the relatively straightforward (it’s no “Lost”) and family-friendly “Super 8” (even with an utterly gratuitous F-bomb and a pot-smoking slacker). Part of the charm is the setting: an analog world where the Sony Walkman is cutting-edge technology.
Be sure to stick around during the credits, when we see the kids’ hilarious zombie movie, allegedly shot by the young actors themselves.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com