Extraterrestrial

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...

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.

I have to confess I came to this film with jaded expectations. I have seen so many alien abduction films that have been utter rubbish I have become rather cynical.

I was then pleasantly, if not, overwhelmingly surprised by Extraterrestrials. Lets start by saying this film is by no means exceptional in any way but what it does, it does well enough to be genuinely entertaining.

The plot is standard fare, aliens encounter young adults in woods, with the usual results. There are some creepy alien scares, combined with enough action to keep you entertained plus a sad love story ending. The special effects are not spectacular but they are certainly not bad either.

The acting is competent too and includes a few well known faces, such as veteran actor Michael Ironside.

Six out of ten from me.

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.

I went into this open minded and willing it to be a good movie. I heard it was a horror / science fiction film, and that the first 30 minutes are worth enduring. I expected it might not get off to a good start and would then find its groove.

It stayed awful.

The main characters are so clichéd and stereotypical, its actually nauseating. A group of guy / girl, good looking party kids head to a cabin in the woods (I know right?) to meet their all to obvious ending. You don't feel anything for these characters, they lack any depth. After ten minutes I looked forward to the aliens killing them off. Unfortunately the abductors took far to long to put the viewer and the said cast out of their misery. Its a cheap Hollywood process to typecast like this. It would have been so much more interesting if it had been a family, or a group of bird watchers, anything different. Why do they always have to go for the Hollywood molded pretty kids?

It does not get any better after that. I don't want to give out any spoilers, but the only glimmer of redemption is the last 30 minutes.

Unless you really have nothing else to do and your watching on DVR, I recommend you skip until the end and just watch the last 30 minutes. You might be led to believe it may have been a decent film up until that point, but trust me, its far from what you might expect.