Review of Evil Aliens

Introduction

`Weird Worlde`, a small cable TV show about bizarre phenomena hosted by Michelle Fox (Emily Booth), sees it`s audience figures plummeting and the producer (Norman Lovett) orders her to find a sensational story to save the station and her job. One problem is that neither Michelle Fox, nor her crew believe in any of the stories they report and when they hear about a woman in a remote area of Wales who has been abducted and impregnated by aliens, they set off with Gavin Gorman (Jamie Honeybourne), the head of the `British UFO Research Committee` (BURC) to investigate in the hope it will make a good story.

The film takes place in Scalleum, an island situated off the coast of north Wales on a farm populated by four seemingly inbred farmers and powered entirely by manure. The cynical crew, accompanied by some actors, set about filming a reconstruction together with interviews, but the real fun starts when the stars of the show appear and prove that aliens are not friendly. This situation calls for desperate measures involving such implements as a longbow, a shotgun, a machete, a rotary tiller and even a combine harvester!

Video

Considering the budget, the video is very good and the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is free from any noticeable defects or flaws. The film was shot on High-Definition video and is one of the better examples of the format that I have seen.

Audio

There are two soundtracks available, Dolby 2.0 stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix, both of which are clear but the 5.1 track has the edge when it comes to atmosphere and highlighting the splatter element of the film.

Features

There is a thirty-six minute interview feature in which most of the cast and Jake West talk about the film and provide insights and answers to many queries you may have about the film. Although there is no commentary, I can`t think of much that would have been revealed that was not covered in the interview featurette.

The `Extended, Deleted, Unused & Unfinished Scenes/Moments` runs at nearly twenty-one minutes and shows exactly what you would expect, with things that didn`t make into the final cut of the film and without ADR, some of the scenes are silent or have indistinct dialogue.

The seven-minute `Bloopers and Out-takes` feature is similar to most others as actors forget their lines, lose it in front of the camera or notice the shadow of the boom mike is in shot.

In `A guided tour of Life Creations`, Jake West take you on a brief tour of the workshop that provided the special makeup effects for the film.

A trailer rounds off the extra features.

Conclusion

As with other `splatstick` films, `Evil Aliens` knows exactly what it is and doesn`t have pretensions of being anything more than an entertaining and gory genre piece. Emily Booth, best know for providing `eye-candy` and fronting the low-budget and obscure TV shows `outTHERE` and `Shock Movie Massacre` is ideally cast as Michelle Fox, who fundamentally performs the same role. The rest of the cast which, aside from Christopher Adamson and Norman Lovett, have appeared in only a handful of films between them do a commendable job and their occasional unease in front of the camera adds to the almost naïve charm of the film.

Jake West unashamedly references numerous horror films (including his own `Razor Blade Smile`) and there are so many homages that there is no way of listing them all here, although the most prominent include a character picking a chainsaw off the wall as in `The Evil Dead`, another flirts with the idea of using a lawnmower to save herself in a nod to `Braindead`, the aliens pursue the humans with silver spheres not dissimilar to those in the `Phantasm` films and the line "we`re gonna need a bigger boat." is even used!

Like Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, Jake West has started his career with a comedy-horror, but whether his career will reach the heights of those luminaries only time will tell. This is clearly not going to be to everyone`s taste, but if you like any film that can be described as `splatstick`, `splatter` or horror in general then `Evil Aliens` will be a film you can`t help but enjoy. It may not be as good as `The Evil Dead` or `Braindead`, but I had a whale of a time watching it - the combine harvester scene had me laughing out loud.