There are times when it seems I cannot resist the opportunity to watch terrible movies. Last night, Channel 5 served up a double whammy of unmitigated crap: Ultraviolet followed by Alien Hunter.
In the former, Milla Lubblyjubblybits supposedly plays a vampire - or haemophage, literally 'a thing that devours blood' - yet never actually consumes blood and only once displays the hint of a fang for the briefest moment. It's a sci-fi movie in the loosest sense, and seemingly purely for spectacle - high-tech gadgetry 'explaining' some of the wackier - and almost entirely computer generated - stunts. Being generous, one could give it points for originality in portraying the vampires as the rebel underclass - victims of a virus fighting for their right to existence in a world fixated on purity - but that might also be seen as adding plot where there is none. Much of the movie is made up of fight scenes, and most of the bits in between are clearly just padding... It is said that a good chunk of the movie (the alleged plot) was edited out to give the movie a PG-13 rating, and much of it was restored in the novelisation... but I'm not curious enough to read it.
The latter movie was quite bizarre, in that it really didn't seem to know what it was. Beginning like The Thing (nicking the snowy setting and the 'mysterious object dug out of the ice') it takes a full hour just to reveal the alien... and even then, there's a mixed message. The pod is giving out a signal which is eventually translated (thanks to a videogame reference) as "DO NOT OPEN", surely implying a nasty alien. Rather than being aggressive and dangerous, it's a peaceful alien that just wants to be friends with James Spader - a fatal mistake, as it turns out - only it came packaged with a flesh-eating virus which kills about half the team almost instantly (not that you'd care - there was no emotional investment in any of the characters, and their deaths are completely glossed over) while the others are just carriers/incubators and realise that they have to stay put and await destruction by Russian nuclear submarine. There's some side-story about genetically modified crops which also become victims of the alien virus, and then the survivors end up getting carted off by the aliens - a clean-up crew who were coming to collect their escape pod thing - about three seconds before the nuke hits.
Considering how much time it devoted to (attempts at) jump scares and building tension (both of which failed), it seemed quite bizarre to change tack quite so dramatically. It was like The Thing crossed with ET and The Abyss... only not as good as any of them. Spader's character was supposedly a womaniser, and yet (mercifully, perhaps) there was precious little evidence of that in the movie. The main bulk of the tension came from the debate over what the 'survivors' of the initial virus attack should do, and that was mainly accomplished through shouting.
The title of the movie seemingly comes from Spader's character - a lecturer of some kind with a sideline in looking for sentient life out in space... Very WTF?
I can honestly say that I regret staying up till after 1.30 this morning for that double-bill of dross...
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