“Extraterrestrial” is a film by the Vicious Brothers, who wrote and directed the horror film “Grave Encounters.” The story follows April and Kyle who are a couple that decide to do a favor for April’s mother, which involves going to a cabin in the woods. Unbeknownst to April, Kyle has invited some of their friends to go along on the trip with them. It’s not long after they get to the cabin that something starts chasing after them.
Review
The movie is almost a typical cabin in the woods story. It has the group of friends which include an obnoxious couple (Seth and Lex), wanting to be party animals while the other couple (April and Kyle) take things a little more serious and a friend (Melanie) who happens to be a childhood friend of April. Just as the partying gets started, something unexplainable happens which ends the fun.
The group of friends see this fireball in the sky which crashes into the woods. They then go to where the explosion happened and this is where the action picks up. They immediately find themselves running from something. Which is constantly the case throughout the movie.
You do get to see the aliens which aren’t actually too scary looking. They look like a mix of the traditional big-headed, big-eyed aliens with a body of the new urban myth craze, Slender Man and they look pretty fake. It sounds creepier than it looks. The movie does try for the sudden scare quite often. Things like, getting a glimpse of an alien or seeing an alien limb before it vanishes. For me, the movie wasn’t too scary but does get a bit cringe-worthy when it gets to about the last 20 minutes of the film. I won’t spoil what happens but here’s a hint, it’s an alien abduction cliche but you actually get to see it happen.
The acting in this film wasn’t completely horrible but it wasn’t very good either. The character that I couldn’t stand was Seth who was played by Jesse Moss (Final Destination 3). Seth was just the typical obnoxious guy, who never got over the party life. He was the guy that drops a cuss word every other sentence and feels the need to record everything. The film stars Brittany Allen who plays April, Freddie Stroma who plays Kyle, Melanie Papalia who plays Melanie, Anja Savic who plays Lex, and Gil Bellows as Deputy Murphy. Brittany Allen, Melanie Papalia and Gil Bellows, did a pretty decent job acting. As for the rest of the cast, they were easily forgettable.
“Extraterrestrial” had the potential of being a lot scarier, especially for being a horror/sci-fi film. Going into the movie, I really didn’t know what to expect but as I was watching it, it was just too predictable other than the twist at the end. If you are a person that is easily terrified by aliens or sudden scares, then this film would be considered scary to you. If the aliens were more believable, I would have probably said this film was pretty scary but it just didn’t quite do it for me.
“Extraterrestrial” hits VOD October 17 and will be in theaters Nov. 21.