I was really surprised by “Alien Incursion”.
It’s not hard to be, frankly. This was a movie that was pretty decently written, pretty decently acted, and even the CG effects weren’t the complete hackjob you see so often with low-to-no budget filmmaking.
Someone put a LOT of time and effort into “Alien Incursion”, and it shows.
Basically, “Alien Incursion” revolves around a recent meteor crash in the middle of a whole lot of national forest. Naturally, like the title gives away, there are aliens in this meteor, and the crash gave them free rein to run amok, eat people, and gestate in their organs.
Naturally, the feds can’t stand for this–THEY want to be the ones with the horrible bloodthirsty monsters under their control!–so they send in a crack team to destroy the aliens, contain the incursion, and possibly even bring back a specimen if at all possible.
Which means that everybody in the forest who witnessed the event is going to have to die. And “death by government” isn’t exactly a romp in the playground.
This isn’t a bad idea for a plot. It’s like a weird mix of “Cabin Fever” and “Alien,” in that we’re in the woods with a party of twentysomethings, none of whom really knows who’s infected with the aliens at any given time, and all of them have to try and fend off both the aliens and the feds. Wow. Two types of weird at once.
Which of course is a tall order for anyone, but thankfully, we’re out in the woods with an armed park ranger—which sounds like a roaring contradiction in terms in a post 9 / 11 world—whose father is a survivalist, former government agent, and has a cabin in the woods loaded with a literal shitload of guns.
Those of you who wish to decry how incredibly convenient this setup is may do so now. Know that you’re not expressing any sentiment that I didn’t already, but it really didn’t get in my way of enjoying the film even one whit.
That’s not the only problem here, either. There’s a nifty little sequence at fifty one minutes and forty six seconds where one of the aliens leaps onto a camper’s down vest. Trey, our camper, then smacks the alien against a tree trunk to knock “it” loose. The alien is seen visibly falling to the ground. The kicker? Trey then picks up a fallen tree limb and takes a swing at the tree trunk. The alien is then shown flying to the ground.
You’ve caught on like I did–that alien was already ON the ground when Trey took that swing.
Again, a minor problem, but no less a problem for the lack of severity.
So despite minor problems like those, “Alien Incursion” is a real surprise in indie sci-fi fare. Because it’s done very well given its contemporaries, those minor gaffes can be forgiven readily in light of the incredible achievement it represents.
