Monday, April 06, 2009

Alien Trespass

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Alien Trespass (C). The conceit of this movie is that it is supposedly a long-lost print of a 1957 alien-and-monster movie that was supposedly tied up in legal battles and was never supposed to be released. (So we learn in a fake newsreel that rolls at the very beginning of the movie.) Eric McCormack (TV's Will & Grace) plays the main character, an astronomer whose body is a temporarily possessed by an alien marshal on the trail of a deadly one-eyed green space monster called a Ghota. Many of the genre's conventions are in place: teenagers who see the monster and escape, police officers who don't believe their story, cheesy special effects, a plucky blond waitress who stands up to the monster, the astronomer's luscious and doting brunette wife (wait, was that part of the convention?), etc. Anyhoo the movie's problem is not a lack of fidelity to the source material--it's an excess of fidelity. Those movies generally weren't very good (with exceptions like The Day the Earth Stood Still), and this one really isn't either. Featuring Robert Patrick (Walk the Line) and Dan Lauria (TV's The Wonder Years) as two of the main cops.

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