Meadhall of the Comitatus

October, folks.  I think we all know what this means . . . 30 days ‘til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween/ 30 days ‘til Halloween, Silver Shamrock!  (And fuck no I will never get tired of referencing that.  EVER.)

To start off in contrast to last year’s “Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies” I decided to start this year off with a movie whose title doesn’t tell me anything at all.  I could only hope it wasn’t a remake of “Altered States.”

Zzzsnxx . . . huh? Is it October yet?

Premise: 1.5/5

Well, good news or bad news has it that this movie is not, in fact, a remake of “Altered States.”  However, this movie itself goes through too many altered states of its own and leaves me cold and confused.

The movie starts off when a trio of rednecks with goofy mullets and grubby beards and ‘staches pull up to a random place full of trees.  They bust out of the van and into action, with one guy holding a harpoon gun, one guy a full-on shotgun, and another guy who looks like he’s going to shit himself in terror at any given moment.  I don’t know why they brought him.  Anyways, these yokels are out to capSHUR them a varmint!  In this case, the varmint is an alien, so that’s new anyway.  Eventually after some cheap “suspense-building” scenes of these three creeping around the woods, they finally get what they came for, and then we find out the real reason they were trying to hunt aliens in the woods here is because some years back each of these three were abducted, tortured, and probed by, well, aliens—the downside is that now they’ve caught one, they don’t really know what to do with it.  They decide to take it with them to yet another childhood friend’s place, who had also been probulated and whatnot but hasn’t had a damn thing to do with them in the years following their terrible time in alientown.

As you might expect, their friend Wyatt is less than enthusiastic about these clowns showing up at his place in the middle of the night with a very alive and very angry alien in tow.  Despite his better judgment, he lets them in, and yet these guys still don’t know what to do with the alien they caught.  Cody, the most Joe Dirt looking of the team is all in favor of torturing the crap out of the alien and eventually killing it, in payback for their torture and the death of Cody’s brother all those years ago.  Wyatt’s convinced that’s one hundred percent the wrong move, because if they kill the alien, then all the other aliens are likely to get extremely mad and wipe out the entire human race.  Otis and Duke, the other two guys, unsurprisingly, have no idea what to do.

"Are you still talking about this movie, Oz?"

Anyways, after what feels like ten or twenty minutes of arguing, yelling, and f-bombing each other with no clear decision being reached, Wyatt’s girlfriend comes to see what the ruckus is (after calling the cops, natch, since we need more bodies when shit starts going down), gets mind-controlled by the alien into cutting it a little free before holding the knife up to her own neck, then gets tackled so she doesn’t finish the job, during which time Cody gets bit by the alien and infected with a fleshrot kinda thing, the alien gets the hell beat out of it some more, and everyone shuts up for at least a short while.  Now that the ball has started rolling, things pick up pace with the alien freeing itself when no one’s watching, cutting the power to the house just in time for the cops to show up, then sneakily rushing into the room with Wyatt’s girlfriend (who’s being guarded by the ever-useless Otis).  The alien gets the drop on him, and after a game of tug-of-war with Otis’s intestines, dead cops happen, and all around madness reigns.  Eventually everyone’s dead, including the alien, with Wyatt and his girl the only survivors—but then more aliens show up and start busting into Wyatt’s house, pretty much as he feared, so they end up hiding in the bomb shelter he built under there which actually could possibly count as cinema history.  For I think the first time ever in a movie, it makes sense that Wyatt has a self-destruct button for his house, a button he gladly pushes once he and the lady are safe inside the shelter, blowing the hell out of the aliens and living to see the next day.

And you know what?  That would’ve been an OK movie.  I certainly wouldn’t have had anything too bad to say about it, but the thing that kept bothering me was that the movie was suffering from multiple personality disorder.  There were some scenes (and the cheesy gopher-hunter looks of Otis, Duke, and Cody) that were pretty obviously supposed to be comedic (not good comedic, but comedic nonetheless), but then the movie would go very intensely towards the horror of the alien thing, and then yet again it would try to be all serious and dramatic when everyone’s reliving the pain of what happened to them years ago.  I can’t even say that that “Altered” is a single attempt to blend comedy, drama, and horror together—it’s more like they had three different ideas of how to make this movie, and since they couldn’t figure out which one they wanted to use they just threw everything together in one pot and said “here you go.”

The alien LOVES to watch.

Cast: 2/5

Overall, the casting’s not that bad.  I can’t think of any particularly hateful or spiteful things to say about any of them, though it would be much more entertaining if I could.  Even if the acting is bad, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell since the writing is so lazy and unfocused that no one seems to know how to play their scenes.  Cody (Paul McCarthy-Boyington) is the crazy guy who did a stint in prison since somehow everyone got to believing that he was responsible for killing his brother and hiding the body somewhere.  So he gets to be sleazy, angry, and borderline-psychotic, and that’s all well and good.  Then there’s Duke (Brad William Henke) who I guess is supposed to be the heart and brains of the alien-snatching scheme, though his mullet makes me think of a Danny McBride without edge or comedic chops.  He’s kind of just a mulleted Care Bear.  Next up we have Otis (Michael C. Williams) who is the sensitive, innocent, naïve bordering on simple dude.  Who gets his intestines pulled out.  The ringleader, if you want to call him that, is Wyatt (Adam Kaufman).  He’s actually pretty good *most* of the time he’s on, walking the line between fear and grit, who’s still haunted by his past even though he’d like to pretend he isn’t.  The problem with Kaufman is that when he’s not doing well, he’s doing really abso-freaking-lutely poorly in the acting department.  There’s a few scenes where he’s required to look wide-eyed and paralyzed with fear, and you just have to laugh at how over the top his “I’m scared” expression is—but I think those are times when we’re not supposed to laugh at the movie.

This one's for the ladies.

Technical: 3/5

I don’t know what the budget for “Altered” was, but I’m sure that it can’t have been that much.  That being said, I admit that I’m pretty damned impressed with some of the special effects in this movie.  The alien spaceship looks like crap, but other than that the aliens—though nothing super-original—look pretty cool and vicious.  It’s nice to see suit-monsters instead of another crappy cheap CGI effect for the big bads of this movie.  But the alien wouldn’t get such high marks on its own, no sir.  What I have to applaud in this movie is the gore effects.  There is some seriously unpleasant stuff going on (such as the oft-mentioned intestine-removal) to all the characters, alien included, in this movie.  And it all looks really good.  Not great, mind you, but for a low budget movie this gore is actually pretty great.  Watching the alien tear into Cody’s arm with its teeth, finding a body crucified with a nail gun, all that kind of thing, really helped me dig the movie more than it’s meandering tone and meh plot would have.  I may be harping on it, but I still can’t forgive the lazy writing and fuzzy atmosphere, as these issues really bring down what could have been a good little scare flick and just irritate me.

Just . . . eww. Eww eww eww.

Popcorn: 2/5

Well, “Altered” is certainly gory, and the excessively juvenile amongst us may find a couple little chuckles in the patchwork bullshit that makes up the bulk of the movie.  It’s certainly not terrible per se, but its lack of direction and refusal to explain what’s going on (we’re led to infer that the aliens, for some reason, are afraid of Wyatt, and a couple times he seems to display some kind of psychic ability, but it’s never expanded on in any meaningful way and just gets dropped in your lap out of nowhere, and to nowhere returns) hobble it.  Why the aliens are fucking with everyone remains unexplained, as does why the aliens who are apparently psychic and have advanced technology prefer to use claws and teeth to mutilate people.  What do they want, and why do we care?  What genre is “Altered” supposed to fit in and why should we watch it?  Unfortunately, we’re still left with no answers.  I’d give this movie a pass—it doesn’t hurt to watch, but you’re not likely to get anything out of it.

Screw flaming bags of poo, burnt alien carcasses are the top Halloween prank of 2010!