Alien Opponent

I reactivated my account just to give ya'll some balance. This movie is a stinker ladies and gentlemen. We can call it "the little movie that could" but we won't because that would be a betrayal to little movies that actually can..and do. "Alien Opponent" is a mess. It is slow to begin and if you can get past the hobbled set-up it doesn't get much better. The acting is, of course, so sub par that Rowdy Roddy Piper is the best of the bunch...and there is a bunch, and that's not saying anything positive. Of course acting is the product of script and direction; the script is tired and humorless. The actors do little to escape the clutches of the feeble clichés they've been degraded too. Sigh...I saw this B grade actor type circus act before in a "little movie that could" called "Feast". "Feast" does it so much better and makes the genre proud. This wretched excuse of a movie is a disgrace. On a "positive" note...the alien, at times, is nicely designed. It has enough originality that it deserves a better movie and a better script. The special effects also are nicely done and there's enough gore for a gore-hound to get their fix. You deserve better and better you can do...by far.

If you're reading this far, it probably means you're hoping to make sense of the title of this review. So let me explain: This movie is fairly low budget, has cheesy clichés everywhere, relatively poor special effects, and generic acting and simplistic dialogue that adheres very strictly to the cookie-cutter character types that populate the script.

Don't get me wrong, all of that is what actually what makes this film GOOD.

Aside from acting, production value, and good special effects, a good movie is made from two other very vital ingredients: cohesion and honesty.

When the director(s) and creators of a movie understand exactly what it is they are trying to convey, and then they creatively use all of the tools in their bag to clearly convey it, the result is a movie with good cohesion. It makes sense, it allows you to follow the story easily, and wraps you into the story.

What do I mean by honesty? I mean that some movies try very hard to be more than what they are, and it often comes off as weak and even a little pretentious.

Alien Opponent puts forth no pretenses. It knows exactly what it wants to be: a fun hillbilly lovin' action/sci-fi comedy.

My only real complaint is that the action sort of dries up towards the end, making things a little slower. They could have used even more characters on the battlefield.

I enjoyed this movie.

This is a what most will call "B" movie. Trying to compare it to multimillion Hollywood productions is not what I am here to do. I will tell you how this fare within the context of a "B" movie and an indie product. If you are looking for a big-budget Hollywood movie please look elsewhere.

To me, I watched this expecting it to be silly. Silly it was, but entertaining! I thought it was going to be a really bad low-budget indie zombie/alien ripoff but I am happy to say that I was thrilled most of the time. Definitely better than the average efforts out there.

It was slow at times, but interjected with the darkest of humor in the appropriate places. I couldn't help but chuckled aloud many times during the course of the show. It also has the vilest of characters and stereotypes but the director definitely did a good job mocking them. The plot was ludicrous , but somehow worked. It will definitely not fail in entertaining folks of the genre.

Decent FX and loads of blood and guts as well. What more does one expect? :-)

Sometimes I just need to relax with an hour and a half of silliness. When I'm lucky, and that's not often at all, I stumble upon a perfect piece, like this Alien Opponent.

The plot has an obvious potential for being funny, wacky, entertaining. The film is all of this. Surprisingly, there is even a proper script, complete with imagination and attention to detail. It's silly but not stupid. The main flaw is bad acting, which forced me to reduce my note from a good to an average movie. Too many characters are portrayed by amateurs. On the other hand, some actors enjoyed themselves while being filmed, and this obvious pleasure contaminates the audience. Personally, I did enjoy the whole show and will watch it again.

As a side note, I don't enjoy gore at all, so I was glad that Alien Opponent contains very little of it, nothing that bothered me.

I have to say I'm honestly surprised the current average mark for this excellent movie is so low, and probably some reviews are so negative.

In a way it's understandable actually, because if many people expected it to be a mega-budget Hollywood blockbuster with a tight plot, dialogs with depth (real or clichéd) and an all-star cast (independence day, Armageddon etc), well then, this movie would definitely be a disappointment.

Well, some people might have been looking for those rare gems, movies with style and a great story but for whatever reason ignored by the establishment (Cube, Cypher, Donnie Darko when it went straight to video because of 9/11 and an airplane crash, despite being one of the best movies ever made).... and again they were in for a disappointment.

So, you might think, why does this lunatic gave it an 8 then? That's actually quite simple, this is a B-movie, shamelessly so, and as such it succeeds in its intent and entertains to no end.

From the very opening, a quiet evening in rednecks-ville with booze, guns and alien ships crashing behind the barn, we're immediately reminded of classic B-movies such as Killer Clowns from Outer Space, Wild Zero, or maybe the pulp fiction that inspired many Tarantino movies. However, while Tarantino tries to invest his silly, gory movies with a serious background that rarely fits, Alien Opponent is a tongue-in-cheek gore fest that entertains us with action, blood, corny dialogs and bizarre deaths all extremely funny.

The movie, as long as a silly, gory B-movie suits your tastes, flashes by in an instant, never boring and always enjoyable. For a bit of mindless fun and gratuitous, silly violence, this movie is a real gem, and in my opinion much more fun than pretentious Hollywood efforts like the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, check it out.

PS I recently watched it again and I had to change the score to a ten. Stupid movie, yes, but really funny. I still think many people just don't get that it's meant to be cheesy and silly. That's what great B-movies are.