Extraterrestrial

Studio: IFC Midnight
Directed by Colin Minihan, written by the Vicious Brothers

Nov 19, 2014 By Cody Ray Shafer Web Exclusive

When a group of teens plans a weekend of reckless partying in a secluded cabin, their plans get blindsided by flaming wreckage. They investigate and find a crashed UFO, and the alien visitors are now loose in the woods. Their night only gets worse from there, as they find themselves on the wrong end of a treaty violation between terrifying space invaders. The supernatural ordeal will force April (Brittany Allen) to reconsider her relationship with her boyfriend Kyle (Freddie Stroma), while they seek help from a paranoid old hippie (Michael Ironside).

If the whole premise of Extraterrestrial sounds familiar, that’s because there’s hardly an original idea in the whole film. The problem is that the Vicious brothers set out to make a movie that echoed UFO mythology in a way that’s never been explicitly seen in cinema, and to an extent they did just that. But they passed the point of familiar and staggered right into cliché a every given chance. The characters, setting, and even plots twists have been tread so many times before that the experience is compromised by predictability, to the point that even the film’s admittedly impressive visual effects can’t hold off the boredom.

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