ALIEN TRESPASS
Directed by R. W. Goodwin
Produced by Goodwin & Crawford Hawkins
Written by Steven Fisher, based on a story by Fisher & James Swift
Released by Roadside Attractions
USA/Canada. 88 min. Rated PG
With Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Jody Thompson & Dan Lauria
 

In a small 1950s Californian town, nerdy astronomer Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack) is among the townspeople who notices something like a shooting star crashing down to Earth. Only Lewis discovers that it’s something else: an alien ship, out of which a metallic alien being named Urp emerges and takes over Lewis’s body, becoming him for the rest of the movie. Urp is on Earth to stop a meddlesome bunch of aliens (shaped like blue blobs with plants hiding their phallic noggins) who have come to take over the world, starting with this town. Everybody has to band together to stop the menace from spreading, with only the skeptical police (Robert Patrick and Dan Lauria) standing in their way.

If it sounds familiar and looks familiar it is, to a T. The director, R. W. Goodwin, set out to make a loving homage to his favorite science fiction films of the ’50s, specifically (and he noted these during a Q & A) The Day the Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, and It Came from Outer Space. Indeed, even if you haven’t seen these movies, you immediately know what to expect just from looking at the movie’s poster or watching the trailer. Alien Trespass is so lovingly rendered from these previous films that you wonder if Goodwin has that Tarantino fan-boy vibe after springing out of TV work (not too ironically, he worked for years directing episodes of The X-Files). 

Because Goodwin is letting the actors play it “straight” as it were, the actors stick firmly to their 1950s gee-whiz characters (with a couple of exceptions). The script is so self-conscious of its influences in both plot and production design that it’s sometimes confused about the line between homage and parody. The films were already funny when they were released, often for very unintentional reasons (This Island Earth was used as the movie for Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie), and Goodwin doesn’t know always when to play a scene for laughs or to actually make it scary.

For example, there’s a scene where Robert Patrick’s character is searching a house for a supposed alien presence. So far the aliens have been leaving their mark on their victims with a puddle of goo, which he comes across, but then it’s too late and an alien (with one big eyeball in the middle of its phallic head) attacks. But it’s hard to tell whether Goodwin wants this to be funny because of the absurdity of the alien, or if he means it to be simply a straight-faced rip-off of any given scene from a ’50s movie. I often wondered how much I should be laughing with the movie or at it, particularly during Eric McCormack’s sort of subtle and deadpan performance. 

And yet it’s hard to fault a movie like Alien Trespass too much. It’s made with lots of care and dedication, and is even more impressive when hearing its circumstances of production (shot in two weeks on a $5 million budget with some impressively cheesy special effects). It also features some very good performances from a who’s who of character actors. Among the bunch of stand-outs, aside from McCormack, Dan Lauria projects great two-dimensional frustration as the biggest skeptic of all finding people in his town dropping likes flies, and Jenni Baird as Tammy, a waitress, spends the movie becoming tough and resilient against the horde of aliens. The movie’s a fun bit of escapism that you don’t have to think much about before, during, or after. Jack Gattanella
April 10, 2009