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It was supposed to be a throwback to all those 1950s sci-fi movies made for the drive-in circuit where it didn't always matter what was on the screen.

But "River of Dread," which had its premiere at the Lyric Theatre at midnight Tuesday, turns out to be a parody of all those flicks. And that suited the whooping. laughing and applauding audience just fine, especially since barely a handful could even remember the 1950s.

One trio arrived in a rented limousine. Others streamed out of a pre-premiere party at nearby Gillie's. Many wore Halloween costumes.

The locally-made-on-a-shoestring picture had more in common with Ed Wood's "Plan Nine from Outer Space" than Ray Bradbury's "It Came from Outer Space," with one difference: The humor in Wood's infamous film was unintentional, while "River of Dread" writer-director Seneca Hayes, who has been involved in many area theater ventures, knew exactly what he was doing.

The movie begins with some special-effects shots of a Mars-like planet, spaceships battling it out in a field of asteroids and then a close-up of our own planet, all courtesy of stop-motion animation -- the same process that gave us the original "King Kong"-- by Ed Gendron. Then it segues to a stream where a country bumpkin played by Jim Elliott is obtaining buckets of water, when something flashes through the sky and crashes nearby.

Sci-fi flicks from "War of the Worlds" and "The Blob" to the aforementioned "It Came from Outer Space" all started just that way. And everybody in the Lyric, whether they had seen those movies or not, knew exactly what the man's fate would be when he investigated.

All that happens even before the credits are completed.

The picture is in glorious black and white but the title appears in red -- just as '50s films would occasionally throw in a color shot, such as at the climax of "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein."

Next, a group of scientists -- think Richard Carlson, John Agar, Edmund Gwenn, Cecil Kellaway -- played by Dave Deshler, F.M. Turner and, recruited in scenes shot at the University of Virginia, Jack Bennett, along with the "girl scientist" played by Deanna Nairns (think Faith Domergue, Mara Corday or Julia Adams).

Turner also composed the music, and Bennett co-produced and edited with Hayes. Turner's voluble bearded scientist nearly steals the show from the frenetic Deshler and the dead-serious Bennett, who does a wonderful takeoff of the generic '50s scene where a scientist gives the rationale for whatever alien thing might be happening.

One sequence has Deshler and Turner carefully lugging a massive "spectrometer" into their laboratory, only to toss it into the air as they hear Nairns' first scream of the picture.

The scientists are concerned about a mysterious radiation -- the culprit for awakening "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," creating the giant ants in "Them!" and contributing to a cease-and-desist edict from outer space in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" -- emanating from the mountains where the space object crashed.

Once an expedition into the mountains is under way, things happen fast. Its members encounter the clunkiest creature this side of "Robot Monster." There is an assistant who insists, as in "The Thing" and "The Man from Planet X," that scientists try for friendly contact with the creature. The audience knew how he was going to end up, too.

Deshler emceed a "scream contest" before the showing, much as Robert Armstrong auditioned Fay Wray in "Kong." He drew a genuinely impressive batch of screamers on stage, female and male, but audience applause chose petite Amanda Porterfield of Blacksburg as the best.

"I'm usually a very quiet person," Porterfield said later.

Much of the movie was filmed around Blacksburg and Mountain Lake in Giles County. The locations and familiar faces no doubt enhanced its audience popularity.

Hayes said his company, Flying Squid Productions, has future projects including a movie to be shot in Arizona in a year or so.

Paul Dellinger has been a reporter with The Roanoke Times for 40 years.