Still reeling from her parents’ divorce, April (Brittany Allen) takes her boyfriend Kyle (Freddie Stroma) and a group of his friends up to the cabin (because her mom wants pictures of the cabin which is up for sale) where she spent her summers as a child.   She is thinking of taking up a job offer for New York while Kyle has big plans for their life together, but it is all interrupted when a fireball crashes from the sky which turns out to be a crashed UFO and April shoots one of the aliens which leads to a chain of events in this alien abduction horror story.   Meanwhile, a sheriff (Gil bellows) is still trying to explain his girlfriends’ disappearance years ago and his investigation into an alien abductee who has been returned sets him on a collision course with the people at the cabin.

 

EXTRATERRESTRIAL is a mixed bag for a sci-fi horror movie which is written and directed by the Vicious Brothers.  They manage to write a group of annoying friends for April and her boyfriend (and I was happy when the most annoying one gets taken by the aliens) and eliminate two of the three likeable characters in the movie within the first hour. Michael Ironside is enjoyable as a weed growing neighbor with plenty of guns and distrust for the government.  EXTRATERRESTRIAL does have its’ moments of suspense and great sci-fi imagery, but the ending nearly unravels it all.  I wish they chose the ending a little bit differently whether it was happy or not because the ending they wrote made me want to hate this movie where I enjoyed most of the first 90 minutes and hated the last five minutes before the end credits.    The Vicious Brothers have created an imperfect movie which I wished would have embraced its 1980s B-movie inspired roots more.

 

SPECIAL FEATURES:

Audio commentary with the Vicious Brothers and actors Brittany Allen and Melanie Papalia

 

Five deleted scenes which were cut from the movie for pacing reasons.

 

The making-of featurette (7:43) has the Vicious Brothers talk about why they made the movie and how it was made, but it shows that they are more in love with visual elements of the movie more than crafting a better script.

Theatrical trailer for the movie and previews for other IFC Midnight releases (The Babbadook, Dark Summer, and Alien Outpost)

 

FINAL ANALYSIS:   EXTRATERRESTRIAL gets some things right while the things they get wrong prevent this from being a sci-fi horror cult classic.

 

This review is ©5-14-2015 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to feedback@enterline-media.com

 

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