Alien: Invasión

Director Albert Pyun does not inspire confidence. His name evokes groans and memories of cheap and often pretentious genre films. But when I heard that his latest project was a single uninterrupted shot I was as intrigued as anyone to see the results. The fact that Infection (retitled Invasion when it DVD) was getting praise from critics only served to heighten my interest.

The film's novelty is that it is a science fiction film told from the fixed view of a high definition camera mounted on a police car. With a cast of mostly unknowns and an aura of mystery, Infection inspired a similar level of intrigue as the much higher profile Cloverfield (2008). If only the results were as exciting. Whether the consequence of budgetary limitations or a misguided artistic aspiration, Infection is a huge disappointment.

Shoddy-looking news footage and title cards set the scene as the film begins with a Police officer driving down the dirt roads of a national park. He meets a local resident acting very strangely. Once again something alien has come to small town USA, but while the soundtrack provides plot information the visual element is an endless steam of footage of bland dirt roads.

Pyun is both a prolific hack and a talentless artist and has been consistently disappointing viewers for nearly 30 years. One can theorise that this event-free narrative experiment and its largely meaningless visuals are intended to isolate viewers. To hypnotise or unsettle an audience used to seeing everything. If that was the artistic intent that's fair enough but it simply doesn't work. While I respect that using a single traveling camera to encounter various characters is a complex undertaking I can't help but feel that he could have done more.

Set within an urban location and with a larger cast this could have been, like Cloverfield, an extraordinary film. As it is it's just a bore. The fact that over-the-top sound design, a smattering of dubious visual effects and an admittedly interesting score seek to shatter the faux-realism of the found footage merely adds to the overwhelming sense of disappointment.

...but that by no means makes it good or even mediocre. This doesn't rise to "complete crap" status. And that's the fascinating part: it's such a non-movie that you keep watching and waiting for something to happen so the movie can get started. But it never does. It actively avoids everything...period. I can't stress enough that isn't an exaggeration, this lack-of-a-movie avoids it's own characters and plot, even just abandoning them completely by the side of the road and goes for a long, slow drive through the countryside. Yes, that literally happens, it's actually a pretty succinct summary of the entire 70 or minute runtime.

The most interesting thing about the whole thing comes from the fact that it was made at all: who thought this was a good enough idea to make a movie? Who heard the pitch and invested real, actual money to make it happen? How can an absolute absence of story and characters and events be anything but boring? Was this just another attempt to scam the foreign video market with a fake movie made for $20 and a tank of gas?

If nothing else, "Invasion" raises a lot of questions. "Can't there be an IMDb rating BELOW 1?", for example.

INFECTION (aka: INVASION) starts out semi-promising. A cop drives down a rural road in his patrol car, recording everything on his dash cam. It seems that a meteor has hit nearby, and something strange is going on as a result.

Unfortunately, this setup lingers on and on. And on, as various people drive the same police car down the same long stretch of road!

To be fair, a couple of zombie-types do wander about, but they only last for about 10 seconds. There are few scares, and even fewer interesting plot developments. Most scenes are made up of lengthy shots of empty road with absolutely no action.

As one of the so-called "found footage" films, this movie could be used as evidence for why the entire sub-genre should be abolished...

Wow. I almost passed on this because its imdb score was 4.0 (which is absolutely insane). This is a minimum 7, might even be an 8 if they cut out the cringey opening slides & added maybe 20-30 minutes of action/climax (it's only 1 hour long, so it definitely had a VERY SOLID base to build from).

It's the best dashcam movie I've ever seen. Based on its imdb score, I thought it would be a B movie I could put on in the background while I did other things; boy was I WRONG! It's short but absolutely grippingly intense with menacing scenery and frantic dialogue throughout. The constrained view of the dashcam really emphasizes your sense of vulnerability. You really become emotionally involved and engrossed by the dashcam filming style. The voice acting is top notch, the little actual acting that there is is decent, but the atmosphere, the atmosphere is what absolutely nails this. I want to give it an 8 so bad, I just wish there was MORE! Okay, I'm giving it an 8.

Compared to another big name horror movie I recently saw, this blows NOSFERATU out of the water and it's not even close.

'What did I do to deserve this?' the lead actress wails and I can't help but wail that question alongside with her.

This movie was told through the perspective of a dashboard mounted camera in a police car, so if watching the view of headlights illuminating a dirt road in the middle of the forest for over an hour is your idea of entertainment, then this is the movie for you! The basic idea of this 'film' is sound, meteorites fall to the earth in a small town and one by one the residents are infected with some kind of alien slug thing deposited in the ear. However, you see none of this. What you do see is headlight illuminated grass with low rent sound effects playing in the background to give the illusion that something intense is going on.

I kept waiting for something to happen, and when nothing happened I kept waiting for someone to bludgeon me over the head for being so stupid as to continue watching this tripe.

If this quantifies as a film, then next time I'm stuck in motorway traffic and not moving for over an hour, I'll just film it and lay a soundtrack of machine gun fire and helicopters over the top and call myself a filmmaker.