Director: Jake West
Year released: 2005
THE CHARGE: They're aliens and they admit they're evil. It's right there in the title.
THE EVIDENCE: It's been said that the really great movies are the ones that teach us something about ourselves. By that definition, Evil Aliens is a really great movie. But I can't say it's a good one.
The movie opens with a shot of bare man ass, as the ass's owner goes to town on a girl in the middle of a field. The couple are captured by a spaceship and, a minute later, we're treated to a graphic scene of the aforementioned ass being probed with a very large power drill. Yes, kids, it's that kind of movie.
Then the story settles down a bit and focuses on the woman, who is back on Earth living on a farm in Wales with her three backwoods brothers. The story of her abduction and apparent implantation of an alien fetus in her womb gets the attention of a reporter from a TV news magazine called Weird Worlde (sic). The reporter, a jaded lass who usually lets her cleavage do most of the talking for her, brings a film crew to interview the woman and a couple of actors to do an on-location re-enactment for the show.
A few cattle mutilations later, the crew finds that the aliens, who look a bit like skinny Predators with PVC piping in place of dreadlocks, are still lurking about and that some nearby stone pillars reminiscent of Stonehenge are actually a charging station for their spacecraft. The woefully underarmed crew battle the aliens and, after a couple of early victories, are optimistic about their chances of surviving the encounter. That is, until the mothership arrives.
This description makes the film sound like a typical shlockfest and it is, for the most part. So what could this film have possibly taught me about myself?
I taught me that at some point in my life, I may have had a drinking problem.
I first saw Evil Aliens years ago and at that time, I thought it was brilliant. The movie offered an amalgamation of over-the-top gore and slapstick humor in the bloody vein of classics like Braindead and Evil Dead 2. It even offers a brief tip of the hat to Peter Jackson's Braindead when a character grabs a lawnmower to fight off a horde of aliens, only to drop it and resort to using a weed whacker instead.
But a rewatch for the purpose of this review revealed that Evil Aliens wasn't the masterful splatstick that I remembered. In truth, it's less like Peter Jackson's Braindead and more like Peter Jackson's Bad Taste. The incredible gore effects I remembered showed, on sober viewing, are on a level about on par with the Sharknado films with CGI blood splatter that could have been rendered with MS Paint. And the humor... let's just put it this way: the film actually contains a gag where an alien slips on a banana peel and ends with a Jerry Springer joke. Ouch.
The movie almost redeems itself with actors who unapologetically throw themselves into their roles and a score that's far better than the film deserves. And the spaceships themselves look pretty darn snazzy. But those faintly gleaming gems of competence are undercut by erratic cinematography - sometimes clear and brilliant, other times murky and grainy - and a story that's virtually non-existent. Aliens invade, people fight them, roll credits.
At one point in my life, I thought this movie was sure to become a cult classic. I can only assume I was very drunk at the time and would like to take this moment to publicly apologize to my liver. Liver, I am so, so sorry. If you felt anything like my brain did upon my rewatch of Evil Aliens, then my treatment of you was unconscionable.
THE VERDICT: Evil Aliens is GUILTY of being the hottie you pick up at the bar at closing time, only to be horrified by in the cold light of dawn.