Extraterrestrial

At least it was not another bad found footage genre film which it looked like it was about to become.

April is a girl assigned by her mom to take some pictures of their cabin lake property for real estate purposes and ends up leading her and her friends into an alien invasion.

The CGI aliens were kinda scary, but they leave noting to the imagination. Nothing unique at all about this movie as a matter of fact. The hot young teens could not be more stereotyped and formulated. It was easy to guess what was coming next.

Although, replacing the slashing moments with alien abductions was a step in the right direction, but does not make the movie.

If you catch it catch, but not worth going out of the way to see it.

The film takes us to the common young characters in a trip to the woods. Aliens who traveled the deep space with incredible technology and still have no clothes and just wanted to terrorize people. If they were always angry about humans, there were no humans.

The film has some nice pictures and scenes, but the characters are horrible and kind of empty, nothing build in a sense of creating the need to know more, everything is predictable. Sounds from the same sample pack of Transformers.

I liked the image of the film, some visuals, light, places, but the story, the characters and the sound effects were just wrong to me, in the way of they may have created something deeper. I don't know what else to say here, because I don't understand how they can create such beautiful images and destroy that with a horrible story, and fail realizing that the story sucks. Or maybe they knew...

Sheriff Murphy (Gil Bellows) of Echo Lake investigates the mysterious disappearance of Nancy McPherson from a seeming alien abduction as well as other strange occurrences. April (Brittany Allen) photographs the family cabin for her mother which is being sold. Her boyfriend Kyle (Freddie Stroma) joins her along with annoying friend Seth (Jesse Moss), Melanie (Melanie Papalia), and Lex (Anja Savcic). Melanie and April stumble upon their neighbor Travis (Michael Ironside)'s marijuana grow operation. Travis is a vet conspiracy nut. An alien spacecraft crashes in the woods.

This movie seems stuck in B-movie territory. It's definitely set up as such and never gets beyond that. The young actors are not that charismatic. Bellows and Ironside are the two named actors but they are mostly support. Ironside goes a little wacky but nothing is actually funny. The script is lacking. There are some functional special effects which border on respectable. However, there is something missing from the directions and camera work. This is not scary nor particularly thrilling. None of it is that good but it's not the worst thing in the world.

Well what to say about this one? I have to laugh again when I see the ratings or read the reviews on IMDb. A lot of haters, and I seriously don't get why. I start wondering if my taste of movies is that bad because most of the time when people hate it I love it. But then again I'm not the only weirdo because my wife liked it as well. Okay the actors might not be the best ones you will ever see, even though I don't think they gave us a bad performance. On the contrary I enjoyed the acting. But what I enjoyed the most was the story. Very entertaining to watch, everything I search for when I want to watch a movie about aliens. Suspense, evil aliens, conspiracy theories, all ingredients were there to make it a nice movie. And that's what it was to me, a nice movie. I will watch it again in the future. To all the haters I can only say, take a chill pill.

The problem with this film, like so many other straight to digital release movies, is the budget. Reading the synopsis, one couldn't possibly expect to see a groundbreaking film. I mean, it's the hundred millionth alien film released in the past couple decades. Yet the writers, for some reason, thought they were up to the challenge. It is apparent that the filmmakers were relying on their ability to take a genre that has been done to death and make it their own, utilizing vivid, amped up action sequences to showcase their aliens. The problem is that there was obviously no money for that. In the age of the billion dollar Hollywood blockbuster, any sci-fi film that relies solely on visuals and action sequences must have the necessary dollars to make it look good. There were so many moments that were desperately trying to send a chill down the spine of the viewer, but fell short solely because of it's inability to look like more than a SyFy network movie.

But something tells me these guys, like most Hollywood filmmakers, simply did not care. The goal is always the same. Get the money, get it done, get it out. Forget the rest. If you're looking to continue the cycle of junk film, made with speedy preparation, while lacking any and all quality, then perhaps this movie is for you. Bon Appetit.