Choker

You see the box. You check out the actors in it. You sniff the disc. You KNOW it's going to be sh*t, but you can't help yourself... You have to give it a taste...

It's just as bad as you feared. You watch the fight sequences, that are beyond parody. You try to follow the story, but fail as you're not high on Class A drugs. The acting... What acting? As for the 'special' effects... They must have been done by 'special' needs people on a ZX Spectrum. No, too advanced. A pocket calculator perhaps? Who on Earth paid for this @:><{?!...

Then it hits you. We NEED films like this to put into perspective how hard it is to make a good movie. It makes you cherish even the mediocre flicks, when you stack movies like this up next to it. So rather than feel I've wasted my time on this crap, next time I sit through an underwhelming 90 minute production I can say: It wasn't great but... At least it wasn't B.E.I.N.G. Or Choker. Or Disturbance. Or whatever the heck they're calling it these days.

Cosmic logic at its finest.

The serial-killer Hud Masters (Paul Sloan) and his partner Logan (Colleen Porch) have been recruited by a governmental agency to hunt down aliens that can survive for a period inhabiting human bodies. Logan reports their murders to her boss Frank Russo (Nick Vallelonga), a family man married with Stacy Russo (Susse Budde) with a daughter, who has a team to remove the bodies and any evidence.

When an alien switch bodies to escape from Hud, Lt. Murcer (Anthony John), Lt. Clark (Bobby Ray Shafer) and the coroner Santo (Katrina Law) are forced to return the bodies and Hud, who had been captured by the detectives, to Frank that explains that one hundred aliens from an evolved race had moved to Earth since their planet is doomed. Now Hud has to chase the dangerous Leader (Hayley DuMond), who has adapted to the atmosphere of our planet and wants to breed.

"Choker" is definitely not a good or an unforgettable sci-fi movie. However, considering the extremely low-budget, it works reasonably well on DVD. The storyline is a rip-off of "The Hidden" and the writer / director Nick Vallelonga is too fat for a skilled agent. One question: if the aliens die in the delivery of their offspring, how could Hud and the Leader be brothers? My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Comando: Exterminador" ("Commando: Extermination")

Choker, apparently renamed as Disturbance at some point for reasons undisclosed, found its way to my collection as a result of the untimely closure of a video store. It sat in my collection, unwatched, for several years.

In a word, it is delightfully awful. The 8 rating is because we enjoy horrible movies and were devastated when MST 3000 ended its run. Choker/Disturbance would have been a classic MST3K excursion. Alas, it fell to my friend and me to play the part of Crow and Tom Servo asking all of the smart-ass questions and maintaining an inane running commentary ourselves. Though amateurs, it was extremely entertaining.

From the monochrome film noir scenes,replete with Hitchcock-esque silhouettes, the cop with a fedora ripped out of 1947, to the hookers without meth mouth, it was a stirring jaunt through the land of cinematic art gone terribly wrong. Unfortunately, the story was fairly coherent and there were no major continuity errors.

So if you too mourn the loss of MST3K, go ahead and get a copy or put it in your queue. Gather 'round the flat screen and have some fun with it just like in the old days.

I watched this old flick because Katrina Law (Spartacus, Arrow) was in it. It is the worst lit movie I have ever (sort of) seen. It is DARK. I don't mean psychologically, I mean they were too cheap, or too broke, to adequately light the scenes of the film. Or maybe they just didn't know what the hell they were doing. You can barely see what the hell is going on in the damn thing.

The plot is convoluted to the point of senselessness and the dialog and actions of the characters are often crotch-grabbingly ridiculous. One egregious example is how Katrina, playing a beautiful young medical examiner, while performing autopsies on corpses displaying disturbing symptoms of weird, unknown, possibly communicable disease, doesn't bother to wear a surgical mask.

I've watched a lot of bad movies/TV shows because they had good looking chicks in them and this does have that. Too bad its not better lit so you can see them more clearly.

Considering what the film makers and cast of "Choker" had to work with as far as budget, time and resources, the film is a triumph of creativity and indie spirit.

Script delivers a fine twisty road to a fun, pulpy resolution and the cast dials in excellent performances in some just-this-side-of-stereotypical roles. The triple-threat of Colleen Porch, Paul Sloan and (especially) Hayley DuMond are a joy to watch on screen.

Technically, flick suffers from occasionally rushed-feeling or under-lit or under-choreographed sequences, but again, considered these folks had 12 days to shoot the film, they did a wonderful job! Overall the film feels more thriller than horror and is quite enjoyable.