Mocking Alien Trespass an Inauthentic Bore
In the star-studded skies of the Mojave Desert, respected astronomer Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack) and his beautiful and adoring wife Lana (Jody Thompson) watch in awe from their back porch as a shooting star slams into a far-off cliff side. Closer to impact, crazy hormonal teens Dick (Andrew Dunbar) and Penny (Sarah Smyth) are thankful for their good luck when the explosive projectile barely misses hitting their car.
Jenni Baird and Eric McCormack in Roadside Attractions' Alien Trespass
But what everyone assumes is a harmless piece of space junk is anything but, a tall, metallic alien named Urp transporting a vicious one-eyed beast called a Ghota to prison before it can cause any harm. But this dangerous creature has escaped, and if the intergalactic peacekeeper can’t stop it soon the entire planet Earth is in imminent danger.
Inspired by classic science fiction thrillers like It Came from Outer Space, The Blob, Invaders from Mars and The Thing, the unabashedly silly and low-tech B-movie Alien Trespass is far more entertaining in concept than it is in execution. While I give director R. W. Goodwin (he helmed nine episodes of “The X-Files”) and writers James Swift and Steven B. Fisher props for letting their hair down and for trying to have a good time, unfortunately all that tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm was completely lost on me. The simple fact is that this movie kind of drove me nuts, and the only emotion it consistently brought out of me was an almost overwhelming desire for the darn thing to come to an end.
The problem isn’t that the filmmakers haven’t done their homework. In point of fact, they have, sometimes brilliantly. The whole scenario screams authenticity, the creature design, character arcs, Theremin-tinged score and nuclear-fueled paranoia positively oozing 1957 sincerity. You look at the movie and almost nothing about it (save a few recognizable faces like McCormack’s) screams like it was manufactured in this young century, and as pieces of pop culture throwback go this one’s basically spot-on.
The problem is that the film is more Ed Wood than Robert Wise. We may look on films like Forbidden Planet, Them! or the original War of the Worlds nowadays as being a little unintentionally campy at times, but the filmmakers never treated them that way themselves. These films are authentic and resolute to the core, the actors taking the material so seriously you’d think they were performing Shakespeare.
That’s where this one goes horribly wrong. The whole thing is played like one great big gag that the cast and crew is having a ball reveling in while the rest of us sit on the sidelines scratching our heads wondering what all the fuss is about. The film is so amazingly insincere it feels wooden and cardboard in the extreme, and while there are some admittedly clever touches (love The Blob and Steve McQueen homage, while newcomer Jenni Baird’s look of blissful euphoria when she discovers the best way to use her vacuum cleaner is totally priceless) there just aren’t enough of them to make sitting though the film worthwhile.
I’m not saying Alien Trespass had to look modern or not play like the genre throwback it desperately longs to be, I’m just saying it needed to take itself a bit more seriously and not wink with such a smugly forceful mocking eye at the audience. It was tiresome, made me question why I so adore both this genre and this era of filmmaking to begin with, and the only thing I want to do now is forget I saw the darn thing in the first place.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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