Sci-Fighters: A Invasão

This really is a great B-movie. Roddy Piper delivers his best performance as an actor to date, ranging from comical to serious to romantic to heartbroken.

The story is very straightforward, but extremely fun and watchable. Considering the budget they had to work with, you really have to admire what they pulled off in this film.

It's very similar thematically to "The Hidden," from 1987. There's a great "unstoppable alien" thing going on here. The chemistry between Piper and the extremely beautiful Jayne Heitmeyer is great. She is fantastic as Dr. Kirbie Younger.

I'll be honest...if you're in to serious A-list films, this is no "Citizen Kane." But if you like great B-movie fun, you could do a whole lot worse than Sci-Fighters. It's B-science fiction gold!

This is a low budget B movie with three interesting actors as its main attraction: Piper (who established himself well in They Live), Drago (who unfortunately never seems to get a role worthy of his abilities) and Heitmeyer (though inconsistent, she had her moments in TV's Earth Final Conflict). Piper and Heitmeyer must find a way to work around their differences and their sexual tension to defeat Drago and the army of alien virus carriers he is spawning through rape and murder.

The film starts out strong - with Drago getting into a fight with a fellow prisoner in a lunar prison and introducing the audience to his nihilism, sadism and psychosis. He dies in prison, but has been infected with an intelligent alien virus which reactivates his nervous system and uses him as a host to spread itself. Piper plays a member of an elite security force, and Heitmeyer plays a microbiologist brought in to study the virus as Drago begins his killing spree. The plot becomes more elaborate as the film progresses, and eventually takes on some details which really challenge believability. For example, it turns out that Heitmeyer vaguely resembes somebody who had been between Drago and Piper when they were in the academy together, and this is used as a device to permit a few gratuitous and silly bra scenes where Heitmeyer distracts Drago from his murderous intentions. Although the actors pull off their performances well enough, and the cinematography is relatively good for the genre, the plot is too thin to be sustained.

The bottom line is that this is not a suitable film for anybody who is NOT a fan of Piper or Drago. Heitmeyer fans will likely find this disappointing. It has little going for it besides decent acting, a reasonable script and a reasonable action-pace.

This movie spent a lot of time trying to explain an incomprehensible plot. They try to just have a bunch of stuff happening instead of having an interesting story. There's at least 35 minutes with no dialogue and trust me, those minutes don't have any action either. The editing was terrible too. In one scene Piper and the woman are walking down the street talking and they go past the same neon sign a dozen times. When they stop, the camera keeps switching angles and that sign is always in the shot. Their vision of what 2009 would be like was very bizarre. There was technology that could literally do anything but America was a 3rd world mess that was mainly populated by fans of The Exploited. To top it off, they couldn't have had a less attractive female lead. This for fans of Piper and bad movies only.

This wouldn't have been a bad movie if they had a script doctor go over the dialog a bit.

Essentially, the world has undergone a nuclear winter, and a convict escapes a lunar prison after being infected by an alien life form designed to convert the world over to methane, and does so by raping women and infecting them with alien-crabs. Or something. Roddy Piper plays a cop who put the convict away, and Jane Heitmeyer plays the hottie doctor trying to find a cure.

Pretty much, that's all the plot you need to hang the action sequences on. Piper gets into some fights, there are explosions, cheap special effects and some nude scenes. I'm sure this film was made on the cheap, but they got a lot out of a cheap budget.

I admit it. I thought this movie was going to be a total piece of crap. But I was wrong.

Adrian Dunn is a violent and very creepy convict serving out his sentence on a lunar base prison. When he kills a fellow inmate, he is infected with a nasty alien virus that the dead man had been carrying. Assumed dead, Adrian is shipped back to Boston for burial...but he awakens as a red eyed zombie inside of his body bag. When a rape victim turns up at police headquarters and identifies Adrian as her assailant, Cameron Grayson, aka Roddy Piper, flies into action! Turns out that Adrian was in jail for the brutal rape-murder of Roddy's wife, Katie. When the rape victim dies a horrible, explosive death, Grayson and his new friend Dr. Kirbie Younger realize that they are running out of time. Adrian is spreading his disease with every woman he rapes, and Kirbie is next on his list.

Okay, yeah. This movie is cheap looking, silly in places and suffers from an abysmal budget, but it's really not that bad! Roddy Piper is quite likable as Grayson, and Jayne Heitmeyer is a smart, resourceful ass kicker. And Billy Drago as Adrian Dunn is awesome! He really makes Adrian a sinister, creepy and somewhat pathetic monster, shuffling zombie-like through the dirty streets. His scene with a woman tied to a bed is really chilling. By film's end, he looks like a melted candle with the worlds worst case of acne. Icky! But really effective.

I've seen much worse movies than this one. "Sci-Fighters", despite its stupid and misleading title, is quite likable and enjoyable with well-drawn and involving characters. Worth watching for Drago's performance alone.