Alien Intruder

Space traveling convicts recruited by Billy Dee Williams become the victims of their own fantasies when a virtual reality femme fatale seduces each of the men and turns them against each other. This low budget 1993 sci-fi effort struggles with its own ideas. The virtual reality scenes are too far removed from the rest of the movie and come across as just a bit silly. The Red Dwarf style special effects are amusing for the wrong reasons and Billy Dee Williams is far too underused amongst a wooden cast. The biggest flaw though during the movie is the complete lack of feeling its set in space, it takes a lot of imagination to consider warehouses, corridors, and computer screens as a spacecraft. Its a shame because there where some interesting ideas that could have been explored better.

Although the idea of aliens using computer viruses to attack terrestrial computers is almost old hat, here the aliens use the viruses as a siren to lure men to their deaths through their computer stimulated libidos. This is a very interesting twist that held a lot of promise when I first heard about it.

The movie fails on one account. The seductress should be the sexiest chick in the movie! Apparently because of miss Scoggins star power, she wore nothing sexier (that could be easily seen) than a one piece bathing suit, while other fantasy women bared all (Tracie did a very dark love scene, where you could barely make out her darkened breasts).

The first question that comes to mind is: "Even though Tracie is a fox, how could she lure the guys from the other gorgeous women that were baring way more skin"? I know she was the virus in control of the men's minds, but I need visual justification for her control over men.

The producers of Alien Intruder threw a bit of everything into the plot - science fiction, the old west (in B/W), bikers, gangsters, the seaside, virtual reality - and soft porn - but nothing jelled into anything remotely interesting. I bought the DVD for 5 bucks when I saw that Billy Dee Williams, Maxwell Caulfield and Tracy Scoggins were in it and because of the blurb GET READY FOR THE SCARIEST "ALIEN" MOVIE YOU'VE EVER SEEN on the DVD back cover. I should have known better! The "special effects" were anything but - the space ships looked clunky and seemed to have enormous interiors - and the steam valves look like those you'd find in any present-day boiler room! There's some nudity and coarse language but none of it helped this dreary production.

Billy Dee Williams gets all morose in space while his band of recruited convicts hook themselves up to virtual reality machines that play out their fantasies. Why are they heading to the mysterious G-Sector? To see what happened to another ship that went out there. What happened to the other ship? Well, some sort of alien took the form of a female and everyone went crazy and killed each trying to win her affections. We see this happen in the first five minutes of the film, and then the film decides to take things nice and easy, which will test the patience of most folks.

Billy Dee's recruits/victims agree to leave the comforts of jail and head off into the unknown due to a machine where they can live out their dreams. They do this every weekend after working on the ship, each with their own little worlds. The demolitions guy lives in the wild west as cowboy, the computer geek is a fifties biker, the other guy lives in a black and white Casablanca world, and our hero shows no imagination whatsoever as he just goes surfing with a chick. Strange, though, that the same mysterious woman has showed up in each of their fantasies, and why is Billy Dee spending all his time staring at a picture of the same woman? And why have a cyborg in the film when he's just going to stand around doing nothing? And one other thing - if you had a virtual reality machine that acted out your fantasies, would you waste it by surfing or driving about on a bike? Or would you be sandwiched between two Czech BBWs? I think that's the option any sane person would pick.

Now, I thought, with the introduction of these separate realities, that I'd have something similar to Waxwork 2 on my hands, but I was wrong. Once the evil alien woman thing (or Ariel, as she's known) 'kills' all the convicts virtual women, we just end up back in space where they find the other ship and end up bickering and running around corridors like a million other films. Maybe it was the budget or something that stopped them from going full throttle with the virtual reality thing, but to spend so much time on it just to have the film settle into the usual conventions seems like a waste of time.

Additionally, the woman playing the alien seductress is noticeably less attractive than any other actress in the film, so I wasn't quite getting why everyone was so bowled over by her. This was a tepid PM production and while it was pretty rubbish, the cheesy effects and infrequent nudity at least kept me from hating it.

OK, just quickly, this was actually very satisfying... Not so much in an action-sense, but because its a well-written warped scifi, with cool cinephilic indulges during the virtual reality sequences...

Get past the pedestrian laser-gun shootout at the beginning and you are then left with a fantastic cast of mostly B-movie actors, with interesting chemistry, in an interesting atmosphere. Tracy Scoggins steals the show with her devilish and mysterious turn.

Its a cheap film, but entirely worth watching. Great late-night movie. One of the better PM Entertainment sci-fi outings.