Director: Eliza Hooper
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: Alien Lifeblood
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Heading out to a remote cabin in the woods, a man tries to make his wife comfortable as she succumbs to a deadly illness, but when a strange alien craft is found crash-landed near the site, his attempts to study its healing powers threaten to destroy everyone who comes in contact.
Review:
This was a fairly solid if somewhat problematic genre effort. Among the better elements within here is the solid central setup that manages to overcome the potential for cliché and offer some intriguing aspects. The main motivation for what’s going on, with the couple coming up to a remote house in the middle of the year to help spend some time together as she starts to succumb to a deadly illness that will strike any moment and get worse the more they spend together, offers a kind of stripped down and simplified way of getting them out to the cabin and starting on their journey. It’s a familiar way to get this one going, while also managing to fill the other big plot point of getting the alien being into their relationship when it crashlands in the woods nearby, and he’s able to secretly bring it to the shed outside as a way to keep it hidden away. The discovery of its blood potentially being able to help cure her condition, and the whole thing starts spiraling out of control with his desire to look into the cause of what its power holds, is a great way to further that and move the film along nicely.
That starts the series of corrupting ideas and generally escalating sense of unchecked power as the creature comes to the forefront. When he realizes early on that the creature’s blood has the power to perform a miracle for her, this lets him try to discover the limit of what it can do with the various attempts to figure out everything it can do in some graphic detail. This is seen best in a series of confrontations between the both of them where it starts to corrupt their faculties to look at how they’re willing to see what the blood can actually do and make both of them willing and able to torture it and keep it tied up in the shed, leading to some tense encounters as they prevent it from escaping or testing how far the blood can take them. The wild finale, offering the kind of wild stalking and brawling that are expected with the creature on the loose, with the various encounters in the woods, a nice bit of metamorphosis for the creature into different stages, and some decent gore, helps to give this a lot to like.
There are some issues here that keep this one down. The main issue here is how utterly absurd and ludicrous the whole thing comes across, as it never makes much logical sense how things play out. The discovery of the alien and what it can do leads to some baffling decisions about how to care for the creature, why they don’t turn it over to the authorities, or figuring out how to successfully harvest its blood instead of it being a naturally occurring part of its anatomy makes little sense, as there’s little in the way of build-up to anything. This has things just happen more than anything, especially once the realization is made about the blood, and she starts to join in on attacking the alien without much context for anything, as it’s just something that happens, similar to the deputy’s insistence that something is wrong. Even though she emerges right in the end, the clues that lead her to wanting to investigate are so flimsy that everything is handled in a brief, unnatural manner from how it should be. Alongside the low-budget limitations that are present, these are what hold this one back overall.
Overview: ***/5
An overall solid if somewhat problematic genre effort, there are some worthwhile factors present here that make for a fun time, with only a few slight issues present holding this down. Those with an appreciation for this kind of genre fare or who are curious about it will have the most to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
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