Alien Beasts [1991]

Occasionally we watch a movie that seems like someone's weird fetish. Sometimes we watch a movie that clearly has no budget. By that slim metric, "Alien Beasts" is technically nothing new for us, but somehow it is more utterly incomprehensible than anything else we've seen (and therefore more likely to be fetish based somehow) and seems to have had a budget that amounts to the cost of a gas mask. The Spanish language videos we made for high school in 2005 are better films than this movie. Our childhood videos filmed by our parents on the same camcorders in 1991 are better films than this one.

Trying to explain the plot of "Alien Beasts" is not really possible. There's no dialogue; only a voiceover who stumbles over his lines and repeats most of them twice and nothing he says makes sense. Even in scenes with people, they don't speak and the few times noises happen, it seems that they don't speak because the sound quality is so bad that the voiceover is meant to explain everything after the fact. The show opens on a man with a gas mask badly fighting a bunch of people in front of a house. By trying to decode the voiceover, it seems that there has been an extra-dimensional portal opened and there are some government agents trying to stop aliens or something. Mostly we get a lot of scenes of unskilled fighting, a guy under a bridge leaking fluid, and an incredibly long scene of an "alien" woman wearing a mask who breaks into a house and gets undressed really really slowly (hence, the fetish thing). Occasionally, the movie cuts away to the mask thing you see on the film cover. In the last few minutes there's a montage of weird art clips that look like an old Nickelodeon advertisement and that maybe suggest some sort of artistry that we never really got to experience, but that's it for the potential of quality. The film ends abruptly but the voiceover assures us everything is fine now.

This movie is really really bad. We got a laugh or two in the beginning because the quality of the film is so bad, but it quickly became tedious. We tried to make it more fun by imagining if Andy Sidaris made it or by imagining that the director is trying and failing to emulate David Lynch, but ultimately it didn't improve the experience. If you want to watch any of it to understand how bad it is, skip around and fast forward.

Spoon Rating: 1.5