From today's Oregonian...
"Alien Trespass" is a low-budget spoof of low-budget '50s sci-fi flicks, which sounds pleasant enough, but director R.W. Goodwin (an "X-Files" vet) makes a fatal mistake: He never takes a clear stance on the material he's spoofing.
A fake newsreel at the beginning of the piece frames "Trespass" as a long-shelved sci-fi B-picture finally seeing the light of day. (It also pads the running time to just under 90 minutes.) The boilerplate genre flick that follows concerns an alien lawman named Urp who crashes his saucer in the California desert and loses his rubber-monster prisoner. Urp borrows the body of a local astronomer (Eric McCormack) to hunt down the murderous beast before it replicates. Cue small-town lawmen and golly-gee teens.
McCormack rocks a pipe and cardigan like he's fronting for the Church of the SubGenius, Louis Febre writes a lush sendup of '50s sci-fi scores and there's one kind-of-clever bit where our heroes confront the monster in a movie theater showing the movie-theater scene from "The Blob." (Meta!) But beyond that, the movie is sadly dull, thin and noncommittal: Half the effects are digital and half are purposely inept, the acting styles are all over the place and the dialogue is boring when it really ought to be funny or at least riotously deadpan. One gets the sinking feeling as "Alien Trespass" drags on that Goodwin thought he could build a whole movie out of a few formal gags about bad editing.
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C-minus; 90 minutes; rated PG for sci-fi action and, I kid you not, "brief historical smoking." Playing in Portland at the Fox Tower.
'Alien Trespass' (The Oregonian, Friday, April 3, 2009)
It would be hard to top _The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra_ for his sort of thing.
Posted by: Walaka | April 04, 2009 at 05:45 PM