Battle of Los Angeles

Cheap CG and blue screen battles aliens.

Made for TV.

Derivative. It's got pods and the queen from Alien, worms from Dune (or maybe it's a sarlacc from Star Wars), and acting from the original Star Trek.

Obviously trying to ride on the back of a major motion picture with nearly identical title.

Not really anything positive about it, unless you're bored with no other sci-fi to watch.

Where are the MST2K bots when you need them?

Right up there with Plan 9 From Outer Space, but not as entertaining.

....and then it was just too much. I really have no point of reference, since i never saw anything remotely as bad as this, but definitely worst movie ever shot. Its worth seeing it only to understand how other movies are good in comparison. Even the bad ones. Is there any chance that i can sue asylum for a bag of popcorn and can of coke that i spent in those 7 minutes of my life that i wasted on this?? I understand problems with low budget movies, technical aspects of it all, but Flash Gordon was a low budget movie a century ago and compared to this is a master piece. Now i seriously suggest to avoid this insult to a movie industry world wide at all costs. And this is coming from a guy who endured an ex girlfriend sobbing after Leo di Caprio in a theater with wooden chairs for 2 and a half hours just to see Titanic sink. I can endure pain but i just found out my limits!

The Mockbuster Factory returns with what may be their most audaciously titled/timed ripoff yet. The big budget sci-fi flick "Battle: Los Angeles" has just hit theaters and a day later "Battle Of Los Angeles" (note the "Of" in the title, people - totally different film!) airs as the SyFy Channel's Saturday Night Original Movie. I wonder how many people were dumb enough to tune in thinking that they were going to be getting the "real" blockbuster for free. If so - joke's on you!! Anyway, I haven't seen the "real" "Battle: Los Angeles," but what I've seen in the trailers, it appears to owe a lot to "Independence Day," and therefore so does "Battle OF Los Angeles." In both versions, a giant spaceship drops out of the skies over the City of Angels, apparently impervious to all Earth weaponry. In the "real" movie, the only ones who can do anything about the alien invasion are a platoon of tough-as-nails U.S. Marines. In the Asylum version, it's a small band of Air National Guardsmen stationed in the hills.

It must be said that the special effects in the first ten or fifteen minutes of "Battle of Los Angeles" actually look somewhat promising. While still characteristically Asylum/SyFy Channel cheap, the invasion/battle scene that opens the film looks like they at least put some kind of effort into it. I would imagine that the majority of the film's (small) budget went into that sequence, as the rest of the film doesn't come close to measuring up to it.

From here, all resemblance to the real "Battle: Los Angeles" ceases. Instead of Aaron Eckhardt and Michelle Rodriguez, we get Kel Mitchell (yes, the former "Welcome to Good Burger, can I take your order?" guy from Nickelodeon) and Nia Peeples. Nia is a sword-swingin' Area 51 ass kicker (aging gracefully in a "Resident Evil" style cat suit) who leads the band of military survivors through the desert (random observation: have you ever noticed how many Asylum films deal with "a small band of survivors traveling through the desert?" I'd say it accounts for a good half of their filmography!)to a final showdown on board the alien ship. I realize this plot description is rather vague, but then that's because as far as I could tell, the film had no real plot to speak of. It's basically a series of random fight scenes, stuff lifted from other (better) movies, lots of people running, guns being fired and stuff blowin' up (in the Asylum's trademark, laughably cheap CGI) and a whole lot of ridiculous dialogue. Shoehorned in for no apparent reason is a fighter pilot from 1942 (?) who is not what he appears to be, a grizzled old airman who tries to shoot down alien ships with a Colt revolver, and "advanced alien weaponry" that looks like it came off the shelves of Toys-R-Us. In short, if you tuned into this movie thinking you were getting the real "Battle: Los Angeles," then you deserve what you got. Bad movie fans who are in on the Asylum's joke will have a hoot and a holler picking apart the usual round of inconsistencies (such as Peeples' suddenly-appearing eye patch) and technical errors. Sit back with a six pack and enjoy. Judging from the reviews I've read of the "real" "Battle Los Angeles" movie, this Asylum-ized version is probably more entertaining anyway.

This is the Asylum's knock-off imitator of the big BATTLE: L.A., and it's pretty dull. The film is muddled by poor pacing, extreme predictability, characters we don't care about, and lack of scope. Budget reasons no doubt affected the latter, resulting in a film that never really visualized the full extent of its concept; all of the action stays concentrated within a small group. Amidst that microcosm, however, the film has action aplenty, although much of it is hampered by the director's turgid pacing – reaction shots hold forever and are repeated over and over at the expense of engaging editing and propulsive forward motion so that the film even at its most exciting seems to proceed at a snail's pace. Cast does okay, especially Nia Peeples as an Area-51 styled military agent whose skill with a katana sword, however incongruous in the modern military, is thrilling, and Robert Pike Daniel as a crusty old-school soldier who takes pot shots at the alien saucers with a revolver, and steals the whole show. A first-rate synth-and-samples score by Brian Ralston & Kays Al-Atrakchi gives the story what propulsion it manages to gather. As the equivalent of a "B" movie it's passable entertainment for the undemanding, but most of us are demanding coherency and creativity. BoLA's story sustains little of that.

This would probably be in the worst 100 science fiction movies of all time. The script writers obviously passed it off to their kids. The director didn't come out of his trailer, the stars should have stayed in theirs. The special effects were the best part of the film, and these looked like a high school project. The sets are ridiculous, the military installations are positively laughable. The only people in this film that actually seemed to pay attention to their job was the wardrobe department, but then military uniforms do not require that much imagination. Why does syfy create this rubbish? I suspect it so that people will turn of the television and go outside in the sun for a few hours. At least that would be a reasonable justification for making this film. Considering watching this film - it is not even bad enough to be funny - just don't and say you did. No one will know the difference. I pretty sure the editor stopped watching it during the cutting.