EVIL ALIENS

Michelle Fox is the host of “Weird World”, a TV show that covers bizarre and often fake news. From Wales comes a news of “alien abduction”: a woman tells of being abducted by aliens and subjected to strange experiments, resulting in her being pregnant immediately after. Michelle, along with her crew, an ufology expert, and two actors, head to Wales, intending to document what should be the scoop of their lives. But a group of evil aliens will clash in a fight to the death with the TV crew. And here it is, also in Italy, only for the home video market, “Evil Aliens”, an independent fanta-horror-splatter film, produced in England in 2005, revisiting in pure troma-style the classic trope of alien invasion. From “Evil Aliens”, a film that has won awards at major genre festivals worldwide, one would expect fireworks, but it partly fails to meet expectations. Certainly, the professionalism with which the special effects were made, even the digital ones, makes the film highly competitive in this regard, even with high-budget Hollywood films; thus perfect makeup, highly realistic prosthetics, and believable digital effects are the strong point of “Evil Aliens”. Not to mention the numerous moments of pure goliardic splatter, a real feast for enthusiasts, capable of eliciting more than one laugh: the impalement and the chase of the aliens on a combine harvester are absolutely worth mentioning. Thus, “Evil Aliens” proves to be a guaranteed divertissement and will surely be appreciated by those who have not missed a Troma film and are willing to abandon their brain cells to their fate for about an hour and twenty minutes. At this point, what makes “Evil Aliens” indigestible? Surely, those who expect tension, suspense, seriousness, credible characters, and an articulated narrative structure from a horror film will turn up their noses; that is, those who prefer “real” horror films! In fact, the basic intentions of “Evil Aliens”, completely focused on easy entertainment and silliness, make it almost more like a parody of a horror than a pure horror. The story is a simple pretext to show a series of funny splatter gags, and the characters are nothing more than one-dimensional figures inserted only to be beheaded, dismembered, impaled, and raped by the aliens. The screenplay is completely rickety, and one often gets the impression that the various situations that make up the film were thought of independently and then tied together in a final revision, thus giving the film a sense of excessive temporal dilation at times. The direction by Jake West is certainly lively, and one gets the impression of not being faced with the usual incompetent person who just wants to show off virtuosity and citationistic knowledge, but a director who, even if a beginner, already has a clear idea of his job. Unfortunately, the entire film, exploiting a ridiculous budget, almost all invested in special effects and alien makeup, is extremely poor in terms of scenery (a shack and an adjacent wheat field) and photography, too flat and televisual, certainly due to the use of digital; not to mention the scandalous actors. An independent product that attempts to retrace the path of “Bad Taste” and “Un dead”, but proving heavily inferior to both. However, it is appreciable for the amusing and well-made splatter special effects. Useful just to have a good laugh.