Hybrid

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!

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.

Always turning a blind eye to the prospect of a new idea, director Fred Olen Ray gives us a remake of CREEPOZOIDS, itself a garden-variety ALIEN knock-off. Here six post nuke survivors seek shelter from an upcoming "ion storm" in a (uh oh) seemingly abandoned scientific lab. Despite finding a half-melted corpse, mysterious slime puddles and body parts lying around the group decide to spend the night and a mutant monster, supposedly a hybrid cockroach/snake (though it looks no different than the monsters usually found in these things) picks them off one by one.

Now that we've established the fact there's no plot, the question remains...Is there anything good here? Well...like many Ray productions, naked chicks are a given. Buxom blonde J.J. North and Brinke Stevens split up from the guys, go exploring, find a shower with warm water and hop in for a lets-toy-with-lesbianism shower romp, nevermind the fact they've already discovered a dead body. Stevens, a veteran Scream Queen for 15 years now, still looks great in her 40's and does a decent job in her role. Tim Abell, in the token Rambo role, also comes off pretty well and exudes leading man potential. Everyone else is awful, the violence is mostly offscreen and the monster design is terrible.

Potential points of interest include a topless pin-up of Michelle Bauer, a publicity poster of Rush Limbaugh (?), extreme misuse of the busy Corman factory stock space FX and probably a record amount of time padding of characters walking down darkly lit corridors.

A group of survivors travelling across the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Earth in the far future seek shelter in an abandoned military installation. Led by McQueen, a heroic drifter, the survivors discover that the installation was the setting for an experiment where a human was infused with alien, snake & cockroach DNA, causing uncontrollable mutation. The creature then emerges from the shadows to attack the survivors.

Ever since he served as DOP on the low-budget zombie flick SHOCK WAVES, Fred Olen Ray has carved out his own unique niche. All he does is make low-budget sci-fi, action & horror films.

While Olen Ray's films cannot compete with their bigger-budgeted rivals, his films do feature an odd-ball sense of humour. "Hybrid" is as typical as Olen Ray's work gets. The film is an extremely cheap rip-off of ALIEN, so cheap that it steals scenes from other Olen Ray films (such as DROID GUNNER & STAR HUNTER), using them for the film's start to depict some kind of apocalypse (which admittedly doesn't work very well) as well as use props from bigger-budgeted films, such as the Landmaster vehicle from the likes of DAMNATION ALLEY & APEX.

While it is a cheap rip-off, "Hybrid" does prove to be quite entertaining. The characters are surprisingly well drawn & acted. The actors know they are starring in a low-budget film & act accordingly. The visual effects are very cheap, with the monster being a rather poor man-in-suit creation that is so bad I ended up laughing – but that's the film's purpose. The creature even has a scene where it has its way with one of the female survivors, causing even more unintentional (or is it intentional?) laughter. Not to mention the fact that Olen Ray throws in a completely superfluous soft-core porn shower scene where the two women rub each other with soap.

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.