Alien Opponent

This is a what most will call "B" movie. Trying to compare it to multimillion Hollywood productions is not what I am here to do. I will tell you how this fare within the context of a "B" movie and an indie product. If you are looking for a big-budget Hollywood movie please look elsewhere.

To me, I watched this expecting it to be silly. Silly it was, but entertaining! I thought it was going to be a really bad low-budget indie zombie/alien ripoff but I am happy to say that I was thrilled most of the time. Definitely better than the average efforts out there.

It was slow at times, but interjected with the darkest of humor in the appropriate places. I couldn't help but chuckled aloud many times during the course of the show. It also has the vilest of characters and stereotypes but the director definitely did a good job mocking them. The plot was ludicrous , but somehow worked. It will definitely not fail in entertaining folks of the genre.

Decent FX and loads of blood and guts as well. What more does one expect? :-)

Sometimes I just need to relax with an hour and a half of silliness. When I'm lucky, and that's not often at all, I stumble upon a perfect piece, like this Alien Opponent.

The plot has an obvious potential for being funny, wacky, entertaining. The film is all of this. Surprisingly, there is even a proper script, complete with imagination and attention to detail. It's silly but not stupid. The main flaw is bad acting, which forced me to reduce my note from a good to an average movie. Too many characters are portrayed by amateurs. On the other hand, some actors enjoyed themselves while being filmed, and this obvious pleasure contaminates the audience. Personally, I did enjoy the whole show and will watch it again.

As a side note, I don't enjoy gore at all, so I was glad that Alien Opponent contains very little of it, nothing that bothered me.

If you're reading this far, it probably means you're hoping to make sense of the title of this review. So let me explain: This movie is fairly low budget, has cheesy clichés everywhere, relatively poor special effects, and generic acting and simplistic dialogue that adheres very strictly to the cookie-cutter character types that populate the script.

Don't get me wrong, all of that is what actually what makes this film GOOD.

Aside from acting, production value, and good special effects, a good movie is made from two other very vital ingredients: cohesion and honesty.

When the director(s) and creators of a movie understand exactly what it is they are trying to convey, and then they creatively use all of the tools in their bag to clearly convey it, the result is a movie with good cohesion. It makes sense, it allows you to follow the story easily, and wraps you into the story.

What do I mean by honesty? I mean that some movies try very hard to be more than what they are, and it often comes off as weak and even a little pretentious.

Alien Opponent puts forth no pretenses. It knows exactly what it wants to be: a fun hillbilly lovin' action/sci-fi comedy.

My only real complaint is that the action sort of dries up towards the end, making things a little slower. They could have used even more characters on the battlefield.

I enjoyed this movie.

I reactivated my account just to give ya'll some balance. This movie is a stinker ladies and gentlemen. We can call it "the little movie that could" but we won't because that would be a betrayal to little movies that actually can..and do. "Alien Opponent" is a mess. It is slow to begin and if you can get past the hobbled set-up it doesn't get much better. The acting is, of course, so sub par that Rowdy Roddy Piper is the best of the bunch...and there is a bunch, and that's not saying anything positive. Of course acting is the product of script and direction; the script is tired and humorless. The actors do little to escape the clutches of the feeble clichés they've been degraded too. Sigh...I saw this B grade actor type circus act before in a "little movie that could" called "Feast". "Feast" does it so much better and makes the genre proud. This wretched excuse of a movie is a disgrace. On a "positive" note...the alien, at times, is nicely designed. It has enough originality that it deserves a better movie and a better script. The special effects also are nicely done and there's enough gore for a gore-hound to get their fix. You deserve better and better you can do...by far.

From the Chiller network comes Alien Opponent! The movie's loose plot follows a bunch of bumpkins and wackos as they attempt to earn the 100,000 dollar bounty that the junk yard owner is offering for the elimination of the alien who just crash landed in the middle of all the junk.

But if you're watching a movie called Alien Opponent, plot isn't one of your biggest concerns. So step one to having a great time: Turn off your brain! That being said, this movie is good, trashy fun. The blood, at least in the uncut DVD, is plentiful and the body count is through the roof. The movie seems to take an approach toward the value of human life that is, well, non-existent. It has the comedy of a Troma film without going so over the top. The characters are colorful and the pace is fluid.

The only recognizable faces present are Jeremy London (Mallrats) and Roddy Piper. Now, this movie is worth watching just to see Piper in action again as the tough-as-nails priest. Everyone else is relatively new but most perform admirably.

This low-budget gem will never win any awards or show up on your top-ten any time soon but I'll be honest with you: I was never bored, I had no idea what would happen next, and I had fun. When all is said and done, what else do you want?