User reviews

What a frustrating mess! You know all those 50's science fiction films loaded with stilted, baby-food expository dialogue? Well the writer/director of Earthling did the exact opposite to the extreme. Nothing is explained! An hour and half into the film and the audience is still left wondering who the main characters are, what their motivations are, and exactly what the plot of film is. Apparently the writer thought his audience was able to read his mind like the aliens in his screenplay. There are dozens of plot elements which are presented and then left to dry on the vine without any explanation about how they fit into the story. A few examples: the atmospheric disturbance at the beginning of the film - What caused it?, What was it's purpose? Never explained in the film; At one point, the astronaut's wife is referred to as his sister. Why? And there are many, many more...

Over and over again throughout the film, these little plot points are raised and then dropped without explanation, never to be heard from again. And the characters are barely introduced, sometimes appearing without any indication of who they are or how they fit into the story -- they're never explained, let alone developed..

Then there are the bizarre behaviors of the characters. A bunch of school teachers getting plastered at the local bar after school. Really? A student asking his teacher to take a drag off of a joint? What planet did this take place on? Not earth. These aren't crucial plot points and don't really serve to develop any characters, so why put that in the film? These types of behaviors by protagonists just erode civil society and I don't understand why producers insist on putting them into their films. And what's with all those agonizingly long, drawn-out bathtub scenes? Again they serve no point in the plot or tone of the film.

There was an almost-original story to be told here. As Liford says in the promo summary, "After a mysterious atmospheric event, a small group of people wake up to realize that their entire lives have been a lie. They are in fact aliens disguised as humans. Now they have to make a choice. Live amongst men, or try to find a way back home."

That sounds like an interesting story, but Earthing failed miserably in telling that story. At the bare minimum, a film has got to to get the story told! I generously gave it 3 stars because, without exception, the actors' performances were extraordinary despite what they had to work with. Also, the cinematography was well done.

Triggers: strobe effects, incest, child exploitation, graphic violence, suicide, drug promotion, racist language (including the N-word), racist casting, antisocial behavior by the protagonists.

Some interesting moments early on, but it goes WAY too slow from halfway to the end, plus gets really confused and left me scratching my head. Still not sure what happened and I don't want to watch it again.

Earthling starts out as an intriguing film. We're left to begin piecing together the disjointed bits of storytelling to begin this fantastic sci-fi journey. After about an hour we're still being teased with disjointed information and characters who know what they're doing but unfortunately forgot to tell us the viewer what they're doing. They act with meaning and motivation but there is no clear reason why they are acting and talking the way they are. It's all very well to be mysterious and aloof but frankly i got lost and ending up not caring what they were doing. It's like the director watched too many David Lynch films and tried to outdo him. In the end i got it but i really didn't care. It went from strong, to confusing to will this please end. The only saving grace was the lead actor, she was brilliant but even towards the end you could just see her delivering lines and probably wondering what the hell was going on too. It's nice to evoke feelings and emotions in film but at the end of the day it's about entertainment. It wasn't there.

This movie is a disjointed mishmash of things that don't make sense: a meaningless opening, constant, meaningless flashbacks and cuts so big you could sail the Queen Mary through them. Depressing background music. Pointless scenes with no rhyme or reason. Fundamental ideas that we've all seen before - obsessive drawing of pictures from Close Encounters, and symbiotes from Stargate, for example.

The holes in the dialog were so big that at one point I had to rewind to watch the run-up to one scene three times to make sure I hadn't missed something. It turns out I hadn't missed anything - it was either another gaping hole in the dialog or the editor went mad and took a meat axe to it.

If the plot got any vaguer this flick wouldn't have one. It's a low-budget, miserable failure. Save yourself the cost of the video hire. Watching paint dry is more entertaining.

Oh, and don't let the mention of Close Encounters or Stargate mislead you into believing this is actually a sci-fi flick. It isn't. It's more of a weird drama that tries to ask "what makes us human?"

Interesting premise. A mysterious object appears from space. As it approaches earth it causes a disturbance. The result is some people have strange dreams. However, this is not a 50's type of sci-fi. It is more of a psychological thriller where high school teacher Judith (Rebecca Spence) and a few others must find out who they really are on the inside. As we watch this movie, we travel the same path and may find out who we really are.

Looking at one-line reviews of this movie you will come away with totally different visions of what you are about to watch. The movie gives too many dimensions and allows the viewer to fixate on just one or two of them. What may appear to be slow to one viewer is methodical to another. What may look unduly artsy to one viewer is the only way to portray the story in the time and media given.

The actual execution of this movie includes drugs and weird relationships. I cannot help but think that they are trying to disseminate more than just the story. If they are I, then missed it and do not have time to pick it up.

I came into this film with unrealistically high expectations. The story was a jumbled mess that never really came together. The acting was bad and the dialogue was mind numbing. Even for a low budget arty sci-fi horror, this was just terrible.

Some sort of attempt at intellectual something or other. A complex behavioral in-depth insight into the human mumbling stuff. Tries sex. Wait, so she's an alien? Who cares.

Gas to be the worst movie I've ever seen...I will never get back the 90+ minutes of my life that I wasted on this crap

Slow-paced and non-linear, the exposition mirrors the heroine's difficult realization of who she is. With that said, the pace of the movie, while generally slow, often suffers from jumps wherein a significant line is half-muttered and passed by with little further comment. Still, the acting was adequate (often better than adequate) and served to maintain the movie's (at times taxing) air of suspense. The central romance, while touching, was not sufficiently developed. Like the rest of the plot, it builds very slowly, then the movie more or less ends. This film was a nice break from big-budget Hollywood sci-fi, and it is definitely NOT for those who prefer the explosions-and-giant-robots side of the genre. If you enjoyed either version of Solaris, then this, while not as good, should be worth the watch.

What if aliens lived among us on earth, in human form, unbeknownst not only to us... but also to them? Clay Liford's Earthling is a strange, ethereally beguiling low budget sci-fi that is very much placed upon the shoulders of its eclectic ensemble cast, who all do a fine job. Several disparate characters in urban USA suddenly find out that they are the extraterrestrial beings placed here by a kind of nomadic sentient spore organism, hung suspended in earths orbit indefinitely. They try to find each other and a way back home while some become attached to the human experience in ways both beautiful and unsettling. This is of course my interpretation of the story because it's told in a fashion that's very hard to coherently access or discern. That's not to say it's badly told or nonsensical, I think that Liford just made this an intensely personal thing from the internal perspective of these beings, and the audience serves merely as flies on a very dreamy wall, observing from the outside and looking down on an experience that's difficult for human brains to understand. It's a fascinating, lyrical, indescribable experience at times, the actors all doing a fine job including Rebecca Spence, William Katt, Savanna Sears, Twin Peaks' Harry Goaz and more. Perennial villain actor Peter Greene shows up surprisingly as one of the humanoid alien beings, getting to play refreshingly against type and display restraint, introspect and use his solid charisma for something other than intimidation. It's a very strange film and won't be for everybody, but if you use the unconscious rather than the intellect to feel your way through the story, you just may be rewarded greatly. Streaming now for free on Tubi.

While this may not appeal to the general public, it is what science fiction can be. Instead of a bunch of intergalactic cowboys facing off with one another, this is a truly thought provoking movie. There are shades of David Lynch in this stark presentation. Several people are suddenly faced with a kind of mass amnesia after an event they can't entirely explain. Because they are humans, they see what as happening to them initially as a type of disease (even epilepsy in one case). Soon they are draw to each other. Part of their problem is that they are such diverse personalities who are filled with distrust. They are drawn to water, particular just off the shore of a small lake where a series of images invade their psyches. They all have growths on their heads, like the beginnings of little deer antlers. They are also losing some of their skin. Things unfold in a really interesting way with tragic consequences, but there is an answer somewhere and it requires a great deal of trust. While this is a highly imperfect film, I appreciated that their reach exceeds their grasp.

This is a very ambitious and complex sci-fi drama with a low budget. It has some similarities to "Another Earth", but this plot is much more complicated. Imagine a mix of dreamy Sopphia Coppola-scenes and some David Cronenberg-creatures, then add some "Solaris". The slow pace and feeling of the film is very beautiful and hypnotic, like Another Earth. The acting in Earthling is really good, especially the main character, and the plot is very implicit witch kept me interested throughout the whole movie. For instance, no one ever mentions the word "alien" or "planet", you have to keep guessing. This is the typical "Filmfestival-sci-fi-drama".

Here's another unique gem of an independent film. With its shockingly unnatural quirks, Earthling will resonate with fans of David Cronenberg's early efforts such as The Brood and Scanners. Earthling is a horror movie with some meaning, not a profound, philosophical meaning, but enough to put the ghastliness in a context that makes it resonate.

Earthling is not a fast-paced blood-fest. Arty and pensive, the film plays out like a character study, interspersed with elements of horror. Featuring an alien possession theme familiar to fans of such thrillers as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Night Of The Creeps, The Hidden, and Slither, Earthling takes a derivative idea and amps it up a notch, adding a degree of sophistication not seen in the aforementioned sci-fi entries. Earthling combines a multi-layered storyline, non-linear plot elements, touches of romance, lesbianism, and visceral sexual themes, with morbid body metamorphoses and grotesque, brain-inhabiting slugs, to produce a genuinely unique and offbeat viewing experience! In Earthling, Rebecca Spence plays Judith, a schoolteacher who begins having bizarre flashbacks and dreams about people she's never met, and events she's never lived. Worse, her body is changing -she's discovered a couple of gnarly growths on either side of her forehead, right at the hairline -she's becoming horny and not in a fun way! Judith doesn't understand what's happening to her, but several creepy people who introduce themselves seem to know quite a bit. The answer has something to do with her mother's death, a mysterious lake, and a comatose astronaut (Matt Socia) who was rescued from the orbiting space station after all hell broke loose up there. One of Judith's new acquaintances, a morose girl named Abby (Amelia Turner), likes to lure women to that enigmatic lake for gruesome littoral bait and switch encounters. The glade hides a repellent secret and after Judith's initial oddball brush with her, Abby's underground entourage of weirdo pals start turning up in unlikely places, triggering a twisted series of sick coincidences.

With touches of the 1972 Solaris (that dissertation-length Soviet movie about a planet with a living consciousness that begins to take cosmonauts under its influence, remade in 2002 with George Clooney), Earthling spans the gap between sociological exploration and outright icky sci-fi horror. Slimy aliens love to screw, and they like to screw humans, and it turns out, vice versa, but exactly who are the aliens and who are the earthlings? Is there truly so much difference between them and us, and does it really matter? What does it mean to be human, anyway? Judith is about to find out. As eerie repressed memories surface, what Judith discovers about herself, her new "friends," and her past is more than she'd like to know.

Judith pieces things together and the movie becomes a bit murky and disjointed. Is this an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to be arty, or does it help us understand her confusion, putting us in her perspective as she struggles to make sense of what's happening? I think the later, and as we go through Judith's experience with her, effective characterization and credible motivations draw us into Judith's nightmare and cause us to ponder. This is the best kind of story -the kind that makes you think. Earthling manages to stay a step ahead of us. Its twists and turns lead to an imaginative unraveling of reality with an ending that isn't predictable.

Even better, the horror of Earthling is the incipient sort, a mounting dread of losing control to something terrible and disgusting that's already deep inside and inescapable. Earthling is uncanny and unsettling because it's filmed like a drama, one that presents a deceptively reassuring, here-and-now sense of the cheery sunlit world around us, but at moments, that world distorts and reveals awful things. The contrast provides a subtle intensity which is delightfully disturbing. What is reality, and how much of it is subjectively determined by the way we conceive of ourselves? When Judith peels back her own mask and looks underneath, she -and we -discover the blood, veins, and mortality which we normally gloss over. The result is the type of revulsion that makes us squirm, the kind we can't get away from, because the horror is us.

Earthling isn't as momentous as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but like that imaginative, existential exploration, Earthling doesn't just hand us the concept; it requires the viewer to do some work, and upon the initial viewing, we carry away a general rather than a specific sense of what's transpired. Earthling's ideas are engaging and give us pause. If you found a planet populated by lifeforms whose personalities and values you really relate to, would you choose to go native? And if so, just how viscerally "native" would you be willing to go?