Free flick of the week: Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America

What if all U.S. military intervention in Latin America could be traced back to a secret alien invasion in the ’50s? It sounds like a lost X-Files plot, except that Tribulation 99 (1992), a featured film on Fandor this month, is after a lot more than just goosing our collective paranoid delusions. Relying entirely on stock footage—some from alarmist Cold War news reels, some from obscure sci-fi movies—experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin rolls out an alternate history of the 20th century, one involving everything from werewolves to cloned dictators to vast swarms of sentient killer bees. Amid all the absurdist conspiracy theory, Baldwin drops hard facts about America’s clandestine involvement in foreign conflicts. The film is a delirious black-comic satire that savages both sides of the political divide—the far right for inventing imaginary “monsters” to scapegoat, the far left for conflating honest-to-God muckraking with the endless pursuit of smoking (ray)guns.