I am beginning to feel the '80's are severely underrated as a decade for weird film.

They were definitely out there.

The stakes of this movie are high enough when all earthly life might be wiped out by a cluster of mutating crystals; we don't need anyone dodging lasers in a five-story airshaft.

I think that sequence struck me as hokey even when I saw it on TV as a teen in the late 70s. (Might even have been pre-teen if it made it to TV quickly enough)