Alien Opponent

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? :-)

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.

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.

Seriously, some people are claiming this film is fun. It is "not"! I rarely write reviews, but this film sucked so bad except for a lot of tightly cupped female breasts. If you want to see some nice bodies in the first half of this film, fine, but the cast is left with nothing to work with. It really just sucks so bad that I felt compelled to complain about it. I don't know if I've written any glowing reviews for films, but those stand out in their own with high scores. This thing has a 4.2 currently, and it's lucky it has that. I'm guessing nice female bodies and decent effects got it that score, but unless you've been living in a cave and humor is new to you, this will be a waste.

I'm normally a fan of "so bad it's good", but this is not one of those films. You want "so bad it's good", check out a Fulci flick, or an excellent piece of art like Burial Ground.

Leave this one to people who have insomnia, cause this is a cure. Even beats Paranormal Activity for induced snores per minute.

I wanted to like this movie.The plot outline sounded like a lot of fun,and being an obviously lower end budget title I went into this one with low expectations and hoping to at least get a few laughs out of it in the process.

It was a simple enough story.Abusive husband catches his wife getting jiggy with it with another man in the barn. Just as the husband is about to give his wife a slapping for her infidelity,mother in law steps and and embeds a hammer into his skull......then hey presto an alien conveniently crashes into the barn. Mother and daughter then offer a large amount of money to anyone who can rid them of the alien and recover the husbands body (presumably to dispose of it later). The alien however has other ideas.....

And so began what should have been a reasonably entertaining action flick as every gun totting whacko from miles around arrived to get a piece of the action.

It was obvious that from the get go,everybody was playing this one for laughs. Unfortunately,the actors were either too wooden or over the top to be anywhere near funny.Even the late Roddy Piper as a gun totting priest couldn't add any comedy to the proceedings.

The action scenes weren't exciting enough because everybody was too busy trying to deliver a torrent of cheesy comments and one liners. To be brutally honest,the talent wasn't there to pull off anything remotely funny.

The alien effects however,were actually rather good.Unfortunately it was the only good thing about the whole movie.

At the end of the day,this is another one of those movies that would have benefited from a bigger budget and better actors.

Shame really.....this could have been something really entertaining.