Extraterrestrial (2014)

It's probably best to start off by saying that Extraterrestrial is a horror movie that will most definitely appeal to die-hard fans of the genre... although maybe not all of them. It's kind of a hard thing to describe but I think this is the type of horror film that is extremely easy to write off as “bad” even though it wears its intentions on its sleeve and doesn't take itself too seriously or pretend to be more serious than it is. Extraterrestrial in many ways is a throwback horror movie to films of the 1980s in how the characters interact and presents a somewhat silly but incredibly fun alien abduction plot very forwardly. As a horror fan I had a lot of fun with Extraterrestrial although I can't say it's actually a great movie or even a unique one at all. Extraterrestrial is a fun, loud horror movie experience with about as many cliches as possible but instead of just being a re-hash I think it has fun with its innate silliness. In other words: I hate that I liked this movie.

Extraterrestrial tells the story of a group of college kids that go to party in a cabin for the weekend and run into some extreme situations that quickly damper the spirit of the party. The main two characters are named April and Kyle and they were high school sweethearts and are thinking about taking their relationship to the next level of commitment. These two go to the cabin with some of their friends (all of whom embody pretty typical characters seen in horror films) for this seemingly innocent party. After a bit of relationship building and setting development a UFO crash lands by the cabin and they realize whatever was flying the saucer is still alive and walking around. Things get pretty crazy from there but anybody who has seen a movie like this may know exactly what happens next. If I have any complaint about this story outside of it following a basic template, it's that it takes a bit too much time developing characters at the beginning (most of whom are too shallow to really care about). What made this fun to watch was how in-your-face the horror aspects were and how this movie takes the polar opposite approach of the “less-is-more” concept. In that regard Extraterrestrial was a lot of fun.

I mentioned that I thought this was sort of a throw back to 1980s movies. By that I mean in how the characters talk and are developed. The types of people presented in this movie are so typical of the genre and so ridiculous and stupid that it feels very much like some of the early Friday the 13^th movies where clueless teenagers and college-age kids wander into terrible situations with blissful ignorance. If stupid, one-dimensional characters doing stupid things makes you angry, Extraterrestrial is not a movie for you. It fully embodies these stereotypes and plays them out in the open. Nobody in this film is particularly likeable, they're all there as canon fodder for what happens later in the film. In a more serious movie this would have bothered me but in a movie that is so honest about how fun it's trying to be, I simply cannot complain about it that much.

Still, I can't fully give this movie a pass just because I had a lot of fun with it. I can see a lot people really despising this movie. As I already stated, Extraterrestrial is quite cliche in its story. If you've seen only a handful of horror flicks chances are one of them was a group of teenagers going to party and end up walking into a bad situation. It's a tried and true template of the genre that keeps reoccurring because of how easy it is to do and change just enough to make the situation slightly different each time. Also, the characters are water thin and certainly not people you're rooting for all that much. Perhaps the two lead characters are an exception to that as the filmmakers really push their relationship (especially near the end). Luckily there aren't many false jump scares and the movie is pretty relentless in its violence which makes everything a bit more surprising and visceral.

Another thing I enjoyed about Extraterrestrial was how it looks. If I can be honest, going into this film I thought it was another found footage film (it isn't outside of one or two scenes near the beginning). So I was surprised to see this type of movie being told in a straight-forward way. For a smaller budgeted film I thought this looked really really good. Most of the special effects are great and the aliens (I hope that isn't a spoiler) are the classic “greys” that are simple and yet still frightening to me for some reason. While maybe the primary filmmakers (the Vicious Brothers) use some CGI a little too frequently to the point that what we are seeing is obviously fake, it was never so bad that it completely took me out of the experience. I was pleasantly surprised with how sharp and moody the film was.

Extraterrestrial is about as basic as it gets as a horror film. It's about a young group of people going to a remote location and running into fantastic circumstances that results in death and terror. You've seen it before probably but that doesn't mean it still can't be fun. Unfortunately I found most of the characters to exist only for the sole purpose of killing them (which makes a movie hard to love sometimes) and it wasn't hard to see where this movie was going (but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a giant smile on my face after the final sequence). Extraterrestrial is middling as a movie in a lot of ways, but those who love 1980s horror movies like me may feel a bit nostalgic here. Above average special effects and fairly quick run time (although a good 10 minutes could have been taken from the beginning) made this movie quite a bit of fun. Horror fans take note... unless you're looking for something much more hard-boiled. Let's call it a guilty pleasure.

7/10