Alien Trespass Review

I don't get it.

At first glimpse Alien Trespass appears to be a parody of 1950's era sci-fi thrillers. Then, after you realize that no one is telling any jokes, it appears to be some kind of homage ... then after a few more minutes you feel you are actually watching a real 1950s era sci-fi thriller, with a brighter sheen and very few thrills.

Alien Trespass tells a story you have seen dozens of times before. A spaceship crashes in a small town where the teens know what's going on, but the police don't seem to care. A monster has escaped the ship, and has started killing everyone in it's path, leaving behind small puddles of ooze.

Eric McCormack plays an astronomer whose curiosity leads him to the ship. While peeking inside his body is taken over by the alien pilot who needs a human appearance to he can hunt down the monster and save the earth.

The film is preceeded with a couple of old 'newsreels' to set the mood, including one giving the history of the film. It turns out Alien Trespass is actually a sci-fi classic from the 50s that was never released because of a disagreement between the studio and the star. The head of the studio threatens to destroy all copies and the negative, but apparently one survived because … here it is.

For all the effort the director put into making the film look and feel like sci-fi films of old, there are some modern day touches that ruin the effect. Rather than swinging the spaceship on a string, the flight is computer generated. Instead of setting off a firecracker on a miniature set, the explosion from the ship’s crash looks real, and the rear-projections that was standard for driving scenes are replaced with green-screen backgrounds that give the same effect, but are no more convincing.

The fun thing about classic sci-fi films (especially the really bad ones) is that 1. The people who made them took their jobs very seriously and 2. They don't age well. So while audiences may have been excited to see a single-eyed slimy creature with deadly tentacles being controlled by (sometimes) unseen fishing line, 50 years later the films become a 'man, I can't believe I ever thought this was good' experience. That’s why the genre is so ripe for parody (Mars Attacks, Monsters vs. Aliens), and you forgive their creators because ‘they didn’t know any better.’

But we know better now.

P.S. The Alien Trespass website has an 8-minute featurette explaining that the film was actually found in a construction site, and that the star of the film is actually Erik McCormack's grandfather.