Hybrid

More cheap inanity from Fred Olen Ray. This one's a blatant rip-off of ALIEN, except made without an ounce of that film's creativity or technical prowess. Instead, Ray opts for plenty of softcore padding, including lesbian shower scenes and the like, and a whole lot of bad acting.

HYBRID is a film for fans of Z-grade movies only. The casting is very poor, as is always the case in his films, and even seasoned performers like Brinke Stevens don't appear to have got any better over the years. John Blyth Barrymore (half-brother of Drew) makes an appearance and Robert Quarry has a cameo, but most of the screen time goes to buxom blonde starlet J. J. North, who let's just say won't be bothering the likes of Kate Winslet in the best acting stakes anytime soon.

Elsewhere, HYBRID features a whole lot of dumb talk, a rubbishy man in a monster suit running around, and not a great deal of violence. Instead, we get stock footage from previous B-movies, and an overwhelming sense of deja vu which sets in after about ten minutes.

The name "Hybrid" is certainly apt, since this film is indeed a mix of all that has come before, with not a single original thought in its head. But it deserves mention for actually being spoofed dead on in another film I watched, "Dr. Horror's House of Idiots". Yes, that's the title. Checking the original again, even the same names were used. No surprise here, as "Hybrid" star Brinke Stevens wrote the spoof :) She must have had fun getting even!

Best thing in film is seeing what appears to be extra stock footage from "Damnation Alley" Dig that crazy truck!

Even though "House of Idiots" is funny on purpose and "Hybrid" by accident, both films should be in a double-bill.

John Blyth Barrymore is to the Barrymore's what Eric was to the Douglas clan! A talentless hack who just appears in movies because of his family name. This movie is a shocker! A cheap, inept alien rip-off which has the obligatory nude scenes to appeal to the men! Poor special effects mean that you barely even see the monster and the most shocking acting known to man makes the people on Dawsons creek seem like great actors! One can only hope that all copies of this movie will be destroyed one day like what happened with the atari 1600 game "ET" and then this movie can disappear, and the actors can pretend it never happened!

I really got more than I bargained for in "Hybrid," and I mean that in a positive AND negative way.

On the plus side, this was an enjoyable altered-human-run-amok film. I categorize "Hybrid" with other bad monster movies, all of which are enjoyable in their lameness (except those rare few that are just plain bad). "Hybrid" actually makes an attempt at plot, and it succeeds somewhat. It's a little flaky, but it works. A lot of times the characters will reference events or something that happened in the history of the world they're on (I'm assuming it was Earth), and somehow I felt as if they just expected me to know what they were talking about. Minimal effort is expended on explaining too far into the history.

Hardly any effort was put into the "creature," but I wouldn't say that's a bad thing. It most reminded me of Godzilla in the man-in-a-rubber-suit aspect. "Hybrid" also utilizes the "drool factor" to give warning of the creature's presence, an over-used device, but I'm not complaining.

There is one reason I probably wouldn't recommend "Hybrid." Sandwiched between normal B-movie fun are two-and-a-half scenes of what could be classified as porn. Newer B-movies use nudity and sex in moderation, but "Hybrid" doesn't even attempt to moderate OR apply some sense of taste to it. This aspect of "Hybrid" completely ruined what is otherwise a decent film.

Don't rent this one if kids will be watching it!!! Other than that, I would recommend "Hybrid" to anybody who can take monster movies with a grain of salt. Even with the intermittent porn, this movie really gave me a good laugh. "Hybrid" is great MST3K fodder, and is great to make fun of.

For those who enjoy cheesy b-grade horror Sci-Fi, Hybrid is a gold mine of goodies.

The movie opens with a couple of minutes of what looks like footage from other sci-fi or disaster movies awkwardly spliced together with little to no attempt toward coherence. Initially I was wondering if this was why the movie was called Hybrid. Random shots of alien spaceships shooting at stuff in space, buildings and cars exploding, a few brief shots of some creature in armour shooting at the screen culminates in a stock shot of a nuclear explosion. None of the footage matches at all, the grain and film is different in each shot, some of it is in broad daylight, some of it is at night, some of its is clearly meant to be in deep space. It is presumably meant to be showing some sort of cataclysmic, apocalyptic event but the details are sketchy. None of the dialogue in the rest of the movie is that helpful- it would seem to indicate some kind of nuclear war but the aliens seen in this prologue are never mentioned and there is even mention of natural disaster at one point. Possibly the makers didn't know what footage they could get their hands on for the opening whilst writing the script and decided to hedge their bets. After this we are treated to a cheapo credit sequence complete with wonderfully cheesy music. I love the fact the title of the movie is in that green blocky computerised type of font that may have looked so cool and futuristic in the seventies (This movie being made in the late nineties).

After a comically bad and short second opening in which some marine types are killed by some unseen creature the movie proper begins. A ragtag group of scientists and military types travelling across a blasted post apocalyptic war zone (a nice cost effective desert) take shelter from a killer ion storm inside an abandoned scientific research facility. From there on it's your standard alien clone as our colourful cast are picked off one by one by a generic monster. In this case it is apparently a cross between human, reptile and cockroach, although it looks like none of the above and I see good reasons for this particular combination beyond those of the "WTF, why not, we're bored and have access to gene splicing technology" variety. It in fact looks like a dude in a really, really fake and rubbery looking 'Alien' rip-off monster costume with a stupidly long neck. It is quite hilarious when you do see it chasing after someone lamely shaking it rubbery claws at someone and shaking its badly balanced and over large cranium from side to side. The makers wisely only show bits of the creature from time to time- every few minutes there is a standard POV shot of the creature roaming the corridors followed by a shot its snarling teeth which may remind you of the snarling drooling teeth of another well known alien creature.

In its relatively short running time Hybrid has almost everything you could want from this kind of trashy pic- a rubbery fake looking alien, cheesy dialogue, gratuitous sex scenes, bad acting, clichés, impromptu and lengthy lesbian shower sequences, fake gore, lots of cheap props and sets, more bad dialogue and acting, creatures beating incessantly on doors, technobabble, alien rape, slime, gratuitous stock footage, loose endings and bad soap operatic back stories. Many will cite the lesbian scene as a highlight but it's all an amiable plateau of cheesy fun from start to finish. Stay watching till the end of the credits which make it clear that the makers of Hybrid were had no illusions as to the kind of film they were making.