A group of tenants in an apartment block are being forced to move out so that it can be demolished. The tenants are reluctant to move, so the developers hire a local gang to persuade them to leave. Fortunately, visiting alien mechanical life-forms come to town. When they befriend the tenants, Frank Riley (Hume Cronyn) and his wife Faye Riley (Jessica Tandy), the aliens use their extraterrestrial abilities to defeat the developers.

otsoNY Comments: Principal photography started in New York in August 1986, but location scouting began almost a year before. Since the story called for a solitary building amidst rubble, the filmmakers had to find a vacant lot with burned-out buildings all around it. They finally settled on an actual building on New York's Lower East Side. The production team designed a three-sided, four-story tenement facade and oversaw its construction on a location that covered most of a city block.

East 8th / 9th Street (btw Avenues C and D) Manhattan.

Rockefeller Center, 5th Avenue (btw West 49th and 50th Streets) Manhattan.

Times Square (Broadway, 7th Avenue, West 42nd and 47th Streets) Manhattan.

otsoNY Comments: The final scene before the end credits has an understanding of construction progress that happens around Riley's Café, without it being affected as tall skyscrapers appear, one at a time, around the tiny building. The new buildings used in the shot near the café are from the World Trade Center even though they had already existed for some time by 1987. Street traffic is seen moving as well as people walking on a foot bridge, indicating a filmed shot at the Trade Center area but the pointed black skyscrapers appear to be duplicated optically to contrast with the tiny café. What looks to be the U.S. Steel Building at 1 Liberty Plaza, seems to be the first to appear in the final shot. The scene itself is a non-existent location but the shot appears to be on Trinity Place, facing North with Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Plaza Park and the U.S. Steel Building both on the lower right.