Alien Force

 

Alien Force
1996
Ron Ford

Alien Force is delicious junk food. All the ingredients are wrong, everything is either under cooked or over baked, yet somehow, it’s delicious. Then after you’re done, your stomach hurts and you regret your choices. Alien Force is a low budget mess that manages to entertain despite its inability to be competent in just about every way. It is what the VHS market of the 1990s was made for, a movie filled with aliens, kung-fu, a dozen familiar elements stolen from other films, and 1/100^th of the budget that somehow made its way into the living room of unsuspecting people on a Friday night after picking up a pizza and some Jujubes.

Omnipresent Praxima (Burt Ward (yes that Burt Ward)) sends scrawny dope turned murder-stud Trace (Tyrone Wade) on a mission to collect the Boxilium(sp?) Egg, a clump of metal that contains billions of deadly aliens.  Trace travels to Earth where he teams up with Sandy (Roxanne Coyne), a woman who's hobbies seem to include walking though really bad parts of town. The two hunt for the Boxilium(sp?) Egg before it falls into the clutches of lumpy headed bad guy, Gorek (Mark Sawyer). Gorek can jump from body to body while all Trace has are a couple of laser guns, a hand held camera, and some sweet pecs.

Character Bio: Has Pecs

 

The grim secret of low budget direct to video movies is that vast majority of them are poorly made, slow, and dull. The shot-on-video production of Alien Force bucks the trend by being poorly made, but rarely dull or slow. This is primarily an action film and it features numerous fights. Although the fight choreography is at times weak, I found the fight editing to be its saving grace.  The editing actually gives the fights some momentum and flow, or alternatively, everything else was so weak that better than mediocre fight editing shined in comparison.

At times Alien Force deliberately tries to be funny and this is often the death knell of a low budget action film. Various film genres have their challenges, but I believe that comedy is far and away the most difficult to pull off successfully. Alien Force fails in its attempts often but here and there it manages to produce some fun moments, most of them courtesy of Burt Ward. More importantly these dashes of humor keep the movie from becoming a grim slog while not undermining the seriousness of the story too much. I mean you can only take a roided up guy punching a grey alien in the woods so seriously, but I can feel the effort behind it all.

Character Bio: Doesn't have pecs

 

I went into Alien Force expecting nothing and was pleasantly surprised to find a few bright spots and a general sense of fun surrounding the whole endeavor. It seems like the people involved were enjoying themselves and that carries over into the film itself. Just don't expect to remember much about this movie after you’ve seen it.