Alien Invasion

Well, I stumbled upon this 2023 sci-fi horror movie by random chance, and seeing how blatantly the movie's cover was a rip-off of the "Aliens" movie, I must admit that I had absolutely zero expectations to the movie, as I opted to sit down and watch it. So why watch it? Well, I do believe in giving a movie that I haven't already seen a fair chance.

Needless to say that "Alien Invasion", from writer Craig McLearie and director Fred Searle, was by no means a good movie. It was a low budget movie make on a shoestring budget, with an alien creature that was so horribly a rip-off of Giger's alien creature design. Sure, I will say that the creature design in "Alien Invasion" was actually good, but you're not in for anything grand here.

The movie title, "Alien Invasion", makes absolutely no sense here, because there was one alien, and it wasn't even doing anything to invade anything. All it did was just run around, chasing some rather bland one-dimensional characters that happened to be within its vicinity.

Surprisingly, I managed to suffer through the 73 minutes that the movie ran for. And trust me, if you stick with the movie to the end, you get to see something that I guarantee that you have never seen before, nor even thought you'd ever get to see. A priest duking it out in a boxing match against an alien creature. I kid you not, that is what writer Craig McLearie opted to go with.

The acting performances in "Alien Invasion" were bland. No familiar faces on the cast list, which is usually something I enjoy in movies. But truth be told, then the actors and actresses virtually had nothing to work with in terms of script, dialogue or character gallery in "Alien Invasion".

Visually then "Alien Invasion" was a bit all over the place. I liked the creature design, as I stated earlier, in the practical effects, but the CGI rendered creature was something taken out of an early 2000s computer game, and it looked horrible.

Do yourself a favor and stay well clear of "Alien Invasion", because it simply isn't worth the time, money or effort. Some of us took a bullet for the team and watched "Alien Invasion", so you don't have to.

My rating of "Alien Invasion" lands on a generous two out of ten stars.

The first 25 minutes is okay considering this is a low-budget production, but thereafter it becomes like a different movie. Acting is absolutely terrible and the main characters are noisy, stupid and annoying. There are also strange gaps in the logic and plot of the story.

My guess is that the majority of the budget was spent on creating the alien suit and SFX. The alien in this movie looks like a crude rip-off of the xenomorph in the 1970s box office movie Alien. In fact, I gave 2 stars mainly because of the alien. It probably is the best part of this movie.

Nonetheless, Alien Invasion isn't in the bottom of the pile. I've seen numerous worse movies, yet I stopped watching it at around 45 minutes. The movie only runs 1 h 20m, but I just couldn't keep watching it any longer. It's a pity, because based on the early parts, the movie had some potential to be better.

I would recommend saving the popcorns and drinks for another movie. Alien Invasion isn't worth watching, even if you feel okay with low-budget movies.

Hosting a special get-together, a group of friends decide to rent out a special house to meet up with friends and realize that they've stumbled upon the landing spot for an alien race when they find an egg on the premises, but when the creature hatches, they must find a way to get away.

This was a fairly decent if rather massively underwhelming feature. The majority of the positives with this one stem from the strong series of confrontations that come about once the intensity picks up and the attacks start happening. The second half here consists pretty much of nothing but the creature confrontations with the whole thing coming about as a nonstop series of encounters around the house and surrounding property as the group is slowly knocked off involving several strong sequences of the creature coming out of the darkness to chase them or bring about some graphic bloodshed in the attacks. While the attacks are based on a familiar and overly silly design, the idea of keeping it a practical suit helps add to this one quite nicely by managing to bring about some fun encounters in that context. Outside of this, there's not much going on with the film. This is mainly due to the inherently bland and familiar storyline that manages to be outright boring when it's not following through on ripping off other, more popular films. This takes way too long to get to the actual appearance of the creature with the majority of the first half spent wallowing with the one-note, completely unlikable main group of friends who do nothing but gossip about who's with who or building up relationship status with everyone else that it completely loses steam by the twenty minute mark in a film that has an hour to go from that point. These scenes are nothing more than an attempt to copy and homage just about every main genre classic this setup can generate, as it's all quite familiar and never tries to offer up much of any kind of originality. Alongside the generally cheap production that runs rampant throughout here and never tries to be anything else, these all hold this one down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

I'm getting a bit fed up with movies like this one and they should scrap all of it's kind. The actings are poor, they using large puppet for their own special affect and the audio is definitely from recording at home. What are the producers getting out of it is beyond my knowledge. The movie is probably only good for their friends and families to laugh with. Not even suitable for DVD. Very low budget, most probably from their Thursday paydays from their other career. Again, these sort of home made videos should not be out on for sale, only for computer artists wanting to learn Adobe AfterEffects.

For a film that's only 70 minutes long...it seems bad tact to have nothing happen for the first 25 minutes.

Which is how long it takes a group of college students to release a fully formed alien, from a small extraterrestrial egg of some sort.

Bad acting aside...the real crime here is that there isn't even any alien invasion at all.

Rather, just a single alien, lashing out, after being brought to Earth against it's will.

And the alien isn't even very original either.

As it's just a bargain basement cross between a Geiger style Xenomorph, and a Predator.

That being said...the alien is definitely the best part of this film.

Despite the fact that it is occasionally rendered with CGI.

Unfortunately...the entire plotline of the film is utterly pointless.

Mainly because it is so empty.

Void of any sort of nuance...or attempt at development, for that matter.

Making it all one long episode of regurgitated high concept trash.

With the plan the characters enact being so nonsensical...it would be humourous...if it wasn't so boring.

It's pretty sad that the effort I put into getting through the film, is more than the writers put in to come up with a competent storyline.

However, there are some funny one-liners in it, at least.

But their laughability is likely a result of their piss poor delivery.

Is this by design, or incompetence?

You be the judge.

I recommend skipping the whole thing altogether, though.

Because it really is quite bad...and not in a good way.

2 out of 10.