Alien Invasion (2023) by Fred Searle

Director: Fred Searle

Year: 2023

Country: United Kingdom

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Creature Feature

Plot:

Hosting a special get-together, a group of friends decide to rent out a special house to meet up with friends and realize that they've stumbled upon the landing spot for an alien race when they find an egg on the premises, but when the creature hatches, they must find a way to get away.

Review:

This was a fairly decent if rather massively underwhelming feature. The majority of the positives with this one stem from the strong series of confrontations that come about once the intensity picks up and the attacks start happening. The second half here consists pretty much of nothing but the creature confrontations with the whole thing coming about as a nonstop series of encounters around the house and surrounding property as the group is slowly knocked off involving several strong sequences of the creature coming out of the darkness to chase them or bring about some graphic bloodshed in the attacks. While the attacks are based on a familiar and overly silly design, the idea of keeping it a practical suit helps add to this one quite nicely by managing to bring about some fun encounters in that context.

Outside of this, there’s not much going on with the film. This is mainly due to the inherently bland and familiar storyline that manages to be outright boring when it’s not following through on ripping off other, more popular films.  This takes way too long to get to the actual appearance of the creature with the majority of the first half spent wallowing with the one-note, completely unlikable main group of friends who do nothing but gossip about who’s with who or building up relationship status with everyone else that it completely loses steam by the twenty minute mark in a film that has an hour to go from that point. These scenes are nothing more than an attempt to copy and homage just about every main genre classic this setup can generate, as it’s all quite familiar and never tries to offer up much of any kind of originality. Alongside the generally cheap production that runs rampant throughout here and never tries to be anything else, these all hold this one down overall.

Overview: **/5

A decidedly watchable if problematic genre effort, this one comes about as a disappointing effort without offering a lot of enjoyable positives to offset these factors in the least. Those with an interest in this particular style or who are fans of the creative crew will have the most to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.