I know what to expect from Asylum - dreadful nonsense that trades off current cinematic trends. But with this one, I almost dared to hope that they might have put some effort in.
The first 30 minutes or so are almost acceptable - the build-up is slow and disjointed, but most of the over-acting is kept to a minimum, and some of the effects actually look as though somebody actually tried to produce something worthy. Some effects sequences are actually fairly effective - though many others are awful.
Unfortunately, whatever small amount of promise may have existed early on, it all falls apart after 30 minutes, with really poor dialogue, laughable acting, lame plotting, and some terrible visual effects.
It does have some unintentional comedy value, as you might expect - much of the dialogue is staggeringly bad. At one point, a woman tells our heroes that she investigates "unexplained events of the terrestrial nature". That is a direct quote.
One minor character asks her how aliens differ from extraterrestrials - quite why anybody would ask such a stupid question is unexplained, but her answer is absolutely mind-boggling. She explains that extraterrestrials attack like a friend, whereas aliens attack like enemies. I challenge anyone to find a more stupid piece of dialogue in any science fiction movie of the past ten years. It's hard to imagine anything more utterly devoid of meaning or sense.
It's a shame, because if this film shows anything, it's that Asylum probably have the resources to produce some decent films if they wanted to. But first, they would need to employ someone who has good ideas, and is capable of translating them into a movie that follows the long-established conventions of storytelling. This film throws out the rulebook in favour of cobbling together events and characters in seemingly random order. They also need talented script writers, or at least skilled script editors.
In summary, I could live with the constraints of a poor budget, if it told a good story. Many great sci-fi stories have been told on a very limited budget - but this really is useless, and I suspect the reason is that very few people at Asylum could care less what anybody thinks, as long as they make a few dollars profit on each tiresome knock-off.
One plus point - it's better than the first Transmorphers film.
