Alien Fury: Countdown to Invasion

This movie was so bad that it more resembled a very tired TV series than a movie. There was no action, the acting, writing, and directing were abysmal, and it wasn't even decently filmed. I will give it credit for having suspense, though it was the half-hearted, stressful kind of suspense you get when you are in denial about the fact that you are sitting through a numbingly pathetic excuse for a movie and you are clinging to a futile hope that in a couple of minutes it might get interesting. This isn't an alien thriller... it had no aliens, or convincing alien technology, and there was no sense of imminent threat (beyond the very real possibility you are having 2 hours sucked from your lifespan by some hack film maker.) The story (Department of defense cover up about alien invasion) might have been good if an actual writer took the idea and built a script around it, but the way this was done, it shouldn't have been more than a half hour long. Don't waste your time... and don't listen to the votes... this isn't better than a 2...

Well, few surprises in this movie. Alien invasion, or is it? A smart scientist figures it out, sinister gummint organization, nuclear weapon launched, abort sent, etc, etc.

The characters - almost every one of them was over acted. The hero, with his Clint Eastwood breathy voice. His wife, the beautiful doctor with always-perfect hair and makeup who works in a public hospital: puh-lease. The slavering general. Cardboard cutouts, every one of them. Grace Phillips in her braless strappy top (and to her credit she looks OK in it) gives some idea of where one of the target demographics of this movie was. The female mud-wrestler type cast as a security guard could be another clue. And almost all the other women, who for some strange reason had short skirts and very high heel shoes, might be yet another.

Special effects were reasonable, although the multiple alien spacecraft sitting in the crater, each one an obvious copy/paste of each other... at first, I thought it was a computer wallpaper. And the stories with the nitrogen inhalers - please, give us nerdy audience types at least a tiny sliver of background knowledge.

I think that the worst sin this movie committed was that it couldn't make up its mind as to what combination of seriousness and comedy it was going to be. But again to be fair, if you set your expectations low enough you might well be entertained.

Another junky, waste-of-time, sci-fi TV movie that should never have been put into production to begin with. ALIEN FURY: COUNTDOWN TO INVASION has a great title which makes it sound like an exciting movie, but in reality it's anything but. Like a lot of low budget extraterrestrial flicks, the major villains in this film are humans themselves, with an alien fleet putting in only a few brief appearances during the running time.

The plot is relatively complex for a film of this type and seems to have been written in answer to the usual X-FILES government conspiracy stuff. A group of officials are busy fooling the public into thinking an alien race is ready to attack the Earth, but then it's the boy who cried wolf time when an alien race really DOES show up and an attack is imminent. The usual wooden heroes have to save the day, and the cast incorporates the typically stiff Dale Midkiff (PET SEMATARY) alongside such familiar character actors as Stephen Tobolowsky. There are some very poor CGI effects here to match the poverty of the storyline.

In San Diego, the powerful Bill Templer (Dale Midkiff) leads a governmental defense agency, and after the explosion of an expensive satellite, the government intends to shut-down his agency. He frauds the government and the population with images showing the danger of an alien attack to justify the explosion of the equipment. The aliens were in the hidden side of the moon ready for attacking Earth. Templer convinces American government to send a nuclear weapon and blows the alien force up before the invasion of Earth. Detective Kevin Anjanette (Dondré T. Whitfield) finds that the images used by Bill Templer are forged and threatens his plans to regain power. This story is so absurd and ridiculous that becomes funny. `Alien Fury' hooked my attention until the last scene to check the capacity of a writer and a director to make such an unbelievable mess. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): `Fúria Alienígena' (`Alien Fury')

A fatuous plot, wooden acting, stereotyped characters, dialogue noteworthy only for its predictability, littered with set-piece cliches, this film combines all these defects into a unique representation of cinematic dysfunction which is symptomatic of the dearth of film making talent in contemporary cinema. This one makes the typical 1930's Three Stooges offerings look like epics ! My advice to prospective viewers is 'Don't waste your time (and money) on this insult to the intelligence.