Hi, Burl here! I remember watching Alien Predators way back in
high school! I probably watched it with my good friend Doug, and if I remember
correctly, we both thought it was boring and uneventful! I couldn’t remember
much about it, except that someone got a head shaped like a football, and that
there was an RV in it!
That’s why I even bothered watching it again: the RV! Ha ha,
I love an RV movie, especially when there’s a siege scene, or at least a scene
of menace! I’m sure you’ve all seen that terrific picture Race With the Devil – that’s more or less the model for this
microgenre as far as ol’ Burl is concerned!
This picture, which was directed by the son of the guy who
made Vanishing Point, takes place in
Spain for reasons I never figured out! But the main cast, three young people
driving around the country in a rented RV, are all American, and three more
annoying people you’d be hard pressed to ever meet! Ha ha, there’s two fellows
and a girl, and it’s kind of a friendly romantic triangle that never turns into
the Jules et Jim situation that would
have made it more interesting! No, they’re all stuck in the aggressive
flirtation stage of their isosceles, and something about the way they prosecute
it makes them seem kind of dim-witted! At any rate, it takes up way too much
screen time!
The actual plot is supposed to be about an alien virus which
crash-landed on Earth along with Skylab, and now, some years later, has
infected the citizens of a small Segovian town, the very town our troika of
heroes is fun-truckin’ their way through! A Spanish NASA scientist explains all
this to the kids, and informs them that head-bursting is part of the infection
process! Yes, we do get to see a head bursting right at the end of the picture,
and it’s not too bad! Really adds some spice to the thing, and spice is
something this movie desperately needs!
An exotic if perplexing setting, some head-bursting and an
RV – those are the ingredients for a magic sauce! But this picture is no magic
sauce – it’s barely worth a hucklebuck! It encourages lots of questions,
though! Ha ha, who is the fellow in the neat-looking truck? Is he meant to be
an alien-possessed madman? And why is there a big NASA laboratory in Spain?
Don’t they do all their work in Florida or Texas, somewhere like that?
There’s a bit of a siege against the RV, but it’s limited to
a short bit involving an ugly alien crab chattering at the window, like a lost
scene from Without Warning or
something like that! Ha ha, it could have been a lot more exciting, and you can
say the same for the entire movie!
I feel like I’ve been down on a lot of movies for the same
reasons of late: namely, that they’re sadly deficient in eventfulness and
action! I really should seek out some pictures that Deliver The Goods, which is
what I always hope for when I sit down to watch a movie like this! Well, there
are some goods delivered – what special effects there are, and what can be made
of them through the murky photography, appear to be pretty good, and come
courtesy of Mark Shostrom, the man behind the trick effects of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and The Supernaturals!
Otherwise I don’t have a lot of marvelous things to say
about Alien Predators, and I guess I’ll
give it one irritating venetian blind shadow!
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