31 Days of Horror Day 2: Extraterrestrial 2014 - REVIEW

When it comes to aliens, most people explain away mysterious lights in the sky as something military related or just plain old pranks committed by bored college kids. Me? I'm more of a "I have to see it to believe it" kind of person and since I've never seen one but I do wonder sometimes... if we are to believe that aliens are real, how would they be? Vicious and unrelenting like the ones in the Alien franchise? Peaceful and loving like E.T.? Funny and full of one-liners like Paul? Maybe they would capture and study us only to realize we're a species of self destructive douchebags and just vaporize us all. Movies give us a plethora of ideas about how aliens would be and Extraterrestrial is no different.

Five friends take off for a weekend of fun at a cabin in the woods only to discover they are  not alone. When one of them shoots and kills an alien, it sets off a chain of events that sends the lot of them running for their lives.

Yes, I know, it's not much of a synopsis but that's about all you'll get from Extraterrestrial. There is nothing ground breaking about it. When it started I thought, "this might end up being pretty good", yet the further into it I got, the more it seemed to fall apart. The cast, while good, were held back by dialogue that felt forced and phenomenal actors like Michael Ironside and Gil Bellows were sorely under used.

In the end, Extraterrestrial ends up being a direct release that's dumped right in the middle of an oversaturated subgenre full of recycled elements and cliché characters that is just "okay". If you're able to make it through the first 60 minutes or so, the ending does differ a bit from the norm but even that seems to come completely out of the blue and doesn't really tie in with the rest of the film. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a disaster because there's definitely an audience out there that would find the silver lining in it. It's worth a one time viewing but I don't see it being something that someone would watch over and over out of pure enjoyment.