Putting the ‘B’ back into ‘B-movie.’
Starring Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, and Jody Thompson. Directed by R.W. Goodwin.
The movie begins with “news reel”-ish footage about how, in 1957, high profile actor Eric McCormack got into a feud with legendary studio head Goldstone. Their skirmish led to Goldstone ordering the destruction of every print and negative of “Alien Trespass” which McCormack says is his nest role to date. This footage has recently been discovered and is now being shown…
The story: Ted Lewis (McCormack) is a famous astronomer and professor living with his wife Lana (Thompson) on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert. One night an alien spaceship crash-lands into the mountains in the desert and he heads up to check it out. As he nears the saucer he encounters a tall, silver spacesuit wearing alien named Urp. Lewis’s body is instantly possessed by Urp whom we find out is an intergalactic “federal marshal” that has to recapture a convict called The Ghota, an alien that kills by absorbing all the water from a person’s body leaving behind a puddle. The Ghota will soon begin dividing and eventually conquer, and destroy, the Earth.
Such is the premise of a movie I would call “amusing.” It’s not bad, it’s just really faithful to the time period that it’s trying to reconstruct in this case, the late 1950s. Think “The Giant Gila Monster,” “Them!” “War of the Worlds,” etc. This movie would be considered a colorized version of them (sorry, “WotW” is colorized I know). Eric McCormack does a great classic know-it-all professor who is then inhabited by an alien. Jenni Baird is the waitress who at first doesn’t believe but then finds truth to what “Marshal Urp” told her. Robert Patrick is Vernon, your alcoholic small-town cop who thinks he’s the sheriff of the town. Dan Lauria is Chief Dawson, a man who took the job until something better came along and is now getting too old for this stuff. And Jody Thompson is the incredibly hot Lana, the wife of Ted Lewis.
Part of the problem with the film is that faithfulness helps and hurts the film at the same time. Current moviegoers may be expecting a spoof or a sendup, not a facsimile. There are some amusing parts and you could probably take your kids to see it without feeling guilty.
Overall, it’s one of those movies best saved for rental or catching on cable on a weekend afternoon. I will say that it’s probably better than most Scifi Network fare if that’s saying anything.
My grade: B-
Chas Andrews' Movie Blog 