Let’s make a crossgenre pie this week, folks. How, you ask? It’s not as hard as you think.
First off, let’s take one part action (pointless violence), one part science fiction (random alien encounter), and one part gooshy horror (low-budget slime mess). Mix them all together in a big old pot of DVD plastic and half-bake the entire concept in a pan lined with the worst script you could find and the result is “Disturbance”, a big steamy pile of a waste of our time.
Plotwise, some guy named Hud Masters, a serial killer on Death Row, got his execution faked by a clandestine government agency. They then injected him with an alien fetus that allows him to hunt, fight, and kill a rogue alien race that left their planet and now uses captured human bodies to move around in. And apparently, they need a whole lot of human bodies, because Hud and company are out in full force to wipe out the aliens who–in a twist of fate–are also working to avoid their own extinction.
Got that?
What it all amounts to is a whole lot of people barfing up glow in the dark green slime and fighting some guy with a shaved head. Over, and over, and over again.
As if that weren’t bad enough, old Hud is going to be desperately thirsty most of the time, and occasionally he’ll hallucinate. Plus, the aliens will even start feeling remorse for all their body snatching. The whole process just gets weirder and weirder.
On the plus side, “Disturbance” moves at a lightning pace. The first half hour was done before I even bothered looking at the time counter. Yet sadly, they can’t keep this pace up for long, and by the end of the second half hour, it’s crawling, limping along while I wonder when this is finally, finally, going to be over with.
The ending is a little sad, a lot trite, even more incomprehensible, like some kind of endurance test. However, there will be one nice out-of-nowhere surprise, almost a consolation gift for having sat through this mess.
The special features on the DVD include audio options, film commentary, Spanish subtitles, a behind the scenes featurette, biographies, and trailers for “Americano”, “Confession”, “Backlash”, and “Disturbance”.
All in all, “Disturbance” is a long, dull trainwrecked combination of action, horror and science fiction that’s as half-baked as it is poorly planned.
