Movie Review - Extraterrestrial

Extraterrestrial

2014

Abduction Film / Manis Film / Vicarious Entertainment / Twin Engine Films / Pink Buffalo Films : IFC Films / IFC Midnight / Signature Entertainment.

6 / 10

So here we have another cabin in the woods story with a group of red-shirt young people, and as always their justification for being there is tenuous.  Evidently, the cabin was the vacation home for April and her family.  Now her family has fallen apart her mother has conned her daughter into going to the cabin to take a few pictures of the shack so she can sell it; apparently, real-estate agents charge the earth for this service.  From the first night, the stereotypical group of friends encounter a series of strange and scary events.

So this sounds very familiar... and it is, though it does have some pretty good points... in the beginning at least.  I loved the opening sequence which is Bill and Ted's Nightmare.  The thing which surprised me most was how good Gil Bellows is as Sheriff Murphy, the scene when he pulls the "let's go die'ers" over was one of my favourite scene's and Bellows is very believable, I wouldn't cross the Sheriff.

Then when Michael Ironside appears I was already enjoying the film and was looking forward to seeing how it would progress...

Down the toilet... with a double flush!

Ironside and Bellows aren't in the movie anywhere near long enough, and though the rest of the cast are okay it's their storyline which lets the film down.  Brittany Allan and Freddie Storma aren't too bad as the lovers, April and Kyle, though they're going through a rough patch.  Melanie, played by Melanie Papalia, is such a bland throwaway character that if she stood in one place for too long she'd just fade away.  Then there's Seth who's portrayed by Jesse Moss; too well if truth be told, as the character is unlikeable and you wonder how anybody could actually be his friend...  Oh, I nearly forgot Lex, Anja Savcic, who is Seth's eye-candy "blonde", at the moment, girlfriend - guess who goes first...

The story starts it's slide into the pan when Travis (Ironside) recounts to the red-shirts that the human race knows about the existence of aliens and it's excepted that if we don't mess with them then they won't do anything too bad to us...  Okay!  Unfortunately, April has killed one of them and this action has put her friends on their hit-list.

Though most of the movie is pretty unoriginal, there are some good scenes like the opening and the one where Murphy comes across a taped abduction and when he gets mind-melded.  The special effects are above average too - the guy's even built a wrecked UFO, though when you see the size of the greys you do wonder how they ever fitted inside.  My favourite effect is the tractor beam... I wanna go!

Though it's the ending that really kills the film.  For some strange reason writer and director Colin Minihan, along with writer Stuart Ortiz (under the pseudonym The Vicious Brothers) opt for an over-the-top unbelievable schmaltzy ending.  Though Minihan is capable of filming nicely stylised shots, with some interesting angles, he's not too great at handling emotion.  The penultimate climax is risible and instead of making me think, NO! you can't do that!, it had me giggling... and cringing...  And the homage to the X-Files is more of an Oh No! than a Cool! moment.  However, he nearly makes up for it with the beautifully filmed climax, the effects and cuts are seamless, I skipped back a few times just to watch that scene over again.

If the Vicious Brothers had risked it all to give the audience a fresh approach to the "Cabin In The Woods" sub-genre with some original characters and a more realistic outcome, as well as filling in some gaping holes in the story, then this could have been a brilliant movie.  Shame.

I would recommend it for the reasons I've stated above as they just outweigh the negative elements, though I would say rent it before you consider buying... and only rent when it's cheap.