ALIEN PREDATORS
(sniff sniff) Smells like crap. Oh, wait...
There was this annual movie review journal that I'd ruffle through every November when it came in to the local public library - I think it's called Cineguide. Anyway, this book is written by a whole slew of reviewers, but there's one thing I noticed: I'd keep coming across references to Alien Predators as being the worst movie of all time, and I'd keep seeing these references in reviews by different writers.
So, as you might imagine, it was with some trepidation that I popped this baby into the VCR.
Written by director Deran Serafian, the script clearly comes from the Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things school of screenwriting. Every single character is meant to be comic relief (relief from what?), and fails. The dialogue is relentlessly inane, to say nothing of the situations (like when one of our heroes, for whatever reason, stumbles around a Spanish villa having a mock gunfight with himself and "doing" James Cagney's death scene from White Heat).
Three Americans, driving across Europe, come across a town full of people getting infected by some alien organism that hitched a ride with Skylab when it smacked into Spain. So basically, it's them vs. zombies, but nowhere near as interesting as it sounds. If that can be imagined.
The characters all come across as extremely annoying, although the woman (Lynn-Holly Johnson, a figure skater IRL) does have her moments of marginal charm. Like I said, unbelievably inane dialogue. There's a not-bad makeup job on one guy, but it's all so dark in that scene, it's hard to see. And the attempts at heartwarming drama are likely to wear out your gag reflex. The romance between two of the leads, the "what do women really look for in guys?" puppy-dog implorations from one guy, the tearful "I hope you two are happy together"...it's horrible, horrible, horrible!
Even the box is incompetent - one of the paragraphs on the back ends with "their only hope for survival is..." without suggesting just what that hope is. Maybe it says something about this movie that when an actual, honest-to-God alien actually shows up (about five minutes from the end - it bursts right outta this guy's head!), it finds itself at the mercy of windshield wipers. (one swipe, whoosh! It's gone.)
Just stupid and crappy from beginning 'til end. Serafian also did that Charlie Sheen/Nastassja Kinski skydiving flick Terminal Velocity, which I admit I really liked. (he also did the widely-avoided but underrated To Die For II: Son Of Darkness, which is worth watching even if it's only to see Rosalind Allen naked) Also known as Alien Predator (yeah, singular), The Falling, and Mutant 2. There's no real relation to Mutant 1, although it sucks just as hard.