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Apr 08, 2014 By Zach Hollwedel Web Exclusive

The Morris family – mom, dad, and three teenaged children – heads into the mountains of North Carolina for a weekend of camping and family bonding. Their first night in the wild is interrupted by three mysterious lights in the sky, which the children immediately assume are UFOs. The following morning, unnerved by the sighting, the family heads toward campground number two, but they get lost along a back road and come face to face with extraterrestrials bent on abducting as many people as possible.

Low budget, found-footage films, popularized and proven profitable by The Blair Witch Project 15 years ago, are a commendable and inexpensive horror sub-genre, but not always successful. Alien Abduction is a prime example. A film about a family embroiled in an alien invasion could be a ton of fun if done well; Alien Abduction isn’t done poorly, per se, but it’s not at all entertaining. It’s formulaic, at times almost laughable, and, deadliest of all, a very boring 70-some minutes.

From the get-go, easy writing and mediocre acting plague Abduction. The Morrises are the happiest family committed to screen in a long time, infusing their trip with hugs, pleasantries, and sing-a-longs. Of course, this is all designed to make their inevitable ordeal and splintering more tragic, but it rings false. The family members suffer from a collective (hereditary?) lack of both common sense and dimensionality, which coupled with the skeletal story and actors’ inability to wring anything interesting out of their roles, leaves the viewers rooting for the aliens to snatch everyone up just so the end credits will roll.

www.alienabductionfilm.com

Author rating: 2/10