Alien Express

This is a truly awful film. Lou Diamond Phillips simply calls this one in. The use of miniature models of the train are laughable. The plot seems to develop on the run (there is an alien on board; oh, and an eco-terrorist is on board too; oh, and the conductor is dead and the train is out of control; oh, and the train is going to run into another train one hour ahead; oh, and that train has nuclear waste on it...). I mean, come on really! The alien monsters are not scary (although there are a lot of them), and the acting is abysmal. Check out the guy playing the "next President" - do you really think he could be President? For goodness sake, he has spent his whole acting career playing bad guys!

I did my best to watch this two hour fiasco. It combined the awful special effects and plot of the original "Blob," with an execrable boosting of the (outstanding in the original) screenplay of "Runaway Train." The only explanation for this movie is that someone needed to take a huge tax deduction and figured they'd combine it with a shot at hosting a casting couch. What an incredible stinker! Lou Diamond Phillips is anxious to show us why he will take any part, no matter how bad. Barry Corbin continues his career as a typecast creep, a U.S. Senator from Texas and plays it well. He should next do the lead role in the story of Trent Lott or Jesse Helms. The women in this flick all seem to have gotten their roles as consolation prizes in the Fay Wray Memorial screaming contest. Special effects are unbelievably bad. H.S. kids in film class in North Dakota could have done a better job. The writers must have pulled a heist at the cliché bank to accumulate this many. I couldn't watch any more without being forced to sit in the Clockwork Orange chair. I have no idea how it ended, except obviously, 119 minutes too late. Ugh! Caveat emptor.

We all know that special effects cost money, but it seems as if they could have used the money they saved writing the script to get some better shots. The train is obviously a model in most moving shots, the helicopter is obviously computer generated, the alien looks like the one from the end of Spaceballs, except it's a decade later and Spaceballs had an excuse.

The only smart thing they did was blur all of the special effects to make them harder to see.

Not even the actors could compensate for such a poorly written script and it's pretty obvious they didn't really try either.

Please, don't waste your time. Please.

I am a big fan of sci-fi movies. So, when I saw this movie in the EPG, I thought I was in for a pleasant evening. What a disappointment ! Such a poor display of "special" effects I could not imagine in 1980, but in 2005 ? Come on, why would you do special effects of an helicopter flying in the desert when you can film a real one for a much lower price (I guess) ? And those killer "muppets"... well, I could do better than that in a couple of hours in the garage. You can expect to have a low budget on a movie, but I don't think it's reasonable to have a low movie for any budget. As for the "star" of the movie (I use a lot of quotes tonight...), Lou Diamond Philips, the guy is not even remotely an actor. Maybe he should have stayed to the martial arts movies. All in all, an awful movie. Maybe I am in a bad mood tonight. Then again, maybe not. A sincere 1 out of 10.

I have seen worse movies off the SyFy channel, but that is not saying much. Everything that I dislike generally about the SyFy original movies is here. And where to begin is going to be start.

1) The special effects are not quite Titanic II bad, but they still have a very artificial look to them. The train itself is not convincing at all, almost reminiscent of a miniature train with the inside shot elsewhere. That may not be the case, but that's how it seemed to me.

2) A lot of SyFy movies have slipshod editing, and Alien Express is no exception. Actually a lot of it is so bad that everything in some scenes look blurred together.

3) If you are looking for a good story, or a good telling of it, look elsewhere. The concept is okay if barely original, but like other SyFy movies the execution is awful. The story itself is leaden in pace, thin in structure and predictable in how it is written. There is also no real tension, thrills or suspense.

4) Not only that, if you are looking for likable characters, Alien Express is not for you. The characters aren't just clichés of the genre, but also SyFy clichés. But clichés don't actually bother me as such, as long as they are well written and not annoying. Alien Express fails on both counts. The characters are underdeveloped, and at the end of the day, while there have been far annoying character before especially in the SyFy movies of the past three or so years, I just didn't care for any of them.

5) Was I expecting the acting to be great? No, not really. But I was expecting some enthusiasm. I didn't get that. Everyone seemed wooden and pretty much phone in their performances.

6) But if I were to single out the worst asset of Alien Express, it has to be the script. Although I do dislike most of the SyFy movies, I do keep watching them for the novelty value and to curiously see if they do anything worthwhile. I may have seen about 40 or so SyFy movies in the past couple of months, but few have had dialogue as atrociously bad as that of Alien Express. It's all stilted and spoils any attempts to give some tension or thrills with how unintentionally funny it is.

Overall, a terrible film, even for SyFy. Not their worst, but towards the bottom end. 1/10 Bethany Cox