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Review: ‘Extraterrestrial’ is almost clever – Metro US

Review: ‘Extraterrestrial’ is almost clever

‘Extraterrestrial’
Director: Colin Minihan
Stars: Brittany Allen, Freddie Stroma
Rating: NR
2 (out of 5) Globes
“Extraterrestrial” is almost clever. It’s a self-aware alien invasion pic that’s not quite self-aware enough. Everything about it is meant to either raise or lower your expectations. On one hand its screenplay is credited to a team billed as “The Vicious Brothers.” (Colin Minihan, who also directed, and Stuart Ortiz are not related, nor sport the surname “Vicious.”) On the other, it’s a cabin in the woods send-up along the lines of “Cabin in the Woods.” But it’s not a full-on parody — and yet it knows that these things are annoying, so it takes it in at least three novel directions. And yet it’s never as inventive as it seems to think it is — but then, what do you expect from a midnight movie programmer?
Back and forth “Extraterrestrial” goes, almost surpassing the low bar it’s set for itself then tumbling below it. It starts off as any other slasher: There a batch of obnoxious, ready-to-be-gorily-dispatched youths heading off for a remote party weekend, plus two sensitive types who have Final Girl and Final Guy practically tattooed on their foreheads. Instead of a deathless psycho, they get an alien right out of Whitley Strieber: the spindly kind that resembles a famished supermodel. There’s a pot-smoking mountain man played by Michael Ironside, who’s not taking this very seriously, plus that guy from “Ally McBeal” — not that one, but that one — who definitely is.
And then it winds up turning…well, not serious, but sort of, and definitely weird. The aliens are not nice; in fact, they’re at least as belligerent as the ones in “Independence Day,” only with less firepower. The third act relocates from the boring forest and its incompetent, low-level police force to the actual spaceship, where the baddies prove at least as nasty as human product testers are on animals. There’s a fair amount of nasty jokes, most memorably one involving a poor/easy-to-hate guy who mistakenly thinks handcuffing himself to a tree will prevent him from being sucked up by a UFO beam. And yet the jokes are only one notch above easy, all about your usual anal probing and indifferent military action. (The ending wants to be “Return of the Living Dead,” but it just can’t get there.) By trying to be better than the norm, it only exposes its own depressing limitations. At least it’s forgettable.

Follow Matt Prigge on Twitter @mattprigge