Specimens

Considered to be one of the most ambitious films made by the Spence Brothers, this stone-age alien extravaganza has everything a true sci-fi fan needs in spades. The mission is simple: aliens must capture and record living specimens from earth. However a violent earthquake forces the ship to take off whilst a giant robot, used to collect specimens, is swallowed up in the eruption. During quarry excavations in the present day the robot is re-animated, and the mission is still on.

Roy Spence is an award-winning amateur filmmaker. For the past 50 years, Spence has been making and screening a series of remarkable and sometimes eccentric films in his cinema in Comber, Co. Down. The films span many genres from sci-fi to horror to folk-life documentaries shot between 1965 and 1986. His collection of over 40 films (13 documentaries/non-fiction and 29 fiction feature films) is held and preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive. To watch more of the Roy Spence Collection click here.