The Day The Earth Stopped is a bad mockbuster that at the very least manages to be more entertaining than the po-faced remake it was copying. The term mockbuster refers to a unique genre of tiny budget films that base themselves off much bigger movies, and release around the same time in the hopes of catching some stray business. Production company The Asylum became particularly well-known for this practice, producing Snakes On A Plane parody Snakes On A Train, the I Am Legend aping I Am Omega or Atlantic Rim, obviously patterned on 2013's Pacific Rim.
While mockbusters are a little less prevalent now than in their heyday they still exist, as proven by Don't Speak, which is based upon A Quiet Place and not the No Doubt song. The latter movie is from British company Proportion Productions, who are also behind similar projects like Jurassic Island or the especially brazen Pet Graveyard.
The Day The Earth Stood Still is a classic 1951 sci-fi movie from director Robert Wise (The Haunting). The story finds an alien visitor named Klaatu coming to Earth accompanied by a robot named Gort and warns the planet that it must learn to live peacefully or be destroyed by other planets. The film was later remade with Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connolly in 2008, but while it pulled in respectable numbers worldwide, it wasn't well-received. The special effects were praised but the film's dour, humorless tone made it surprisingly dull.
Since this period was something of a golden era for Asylum mockbusters, The Day The Earth Stopped also arrived in 2008. Directed by and starring C. Thomas Howell (Red Dawn), the familiar setup finds 666 giant robots appearing around the world, and humanity is set to be wiped out. This might be prevented with the arrival of two alien messengers - a man and a woman - who want mankind to prove to them they're worth saving.
Like a lot of Asylum productions, The Day The Earth Stopped is almost painfully low-budget and suffers from bad acting and a derivative story. That said, its sparingly used CGI isn't half-bad and its a good deal zippier than The Day The Earth Stood Still remake. Whereas that version was too po-faced and self-serious, The Day The Earth Stopped is a pure b-movie for start to finish. It's not an especially good one, but it gets the job done a lot faster than the Keanu Reeves version and on the whole, it's just more fun.