Alien Lockdown

I've seen worse. Which is not exactly a compliment for this movie considering some of the utter garbage I have encountered in the last few months on the Sci Fi Channel and elsewhere. Nonetheless, while this movie was bad, it falls more under the rubric of the traditional bad Grade B movie which just rips off its entire plot, creature, setting and everything else from superior movies, but still manages to be mildly entertaining. Indeed if this movie had been the first of its kind, there would even have been a few laudable things to comment on -- the unrelentingly dark and creepy remote laboratory, a suitably vicious creature which kills in gory fashion (and looks like they spent a little money creating) etc. But as it is, its just one cliché after another. Its been done better many times before. But then again, its been done worse. If you want to see how bad a movie with "Alien" in its title can be, check out something called "Alien 51". Comparatively this is a work of art, and while I am glad I did not rent it, I am not entirely upset at having turned on the TV to catch it. For fans of the genre, not good, but not pluck your eyes out terrible either.

Let's be honest. Alien Lockdown, also known as Creature, is a crude, low-budget rip-off of several blockbuster sci-fi classics, most notably Aliens, Predator, and Resident Evil. The only reason it isn't at the very bottom of the pile is because it relies on a proven formula. But make no mistake: this is not a good movie, and it falls far short of the iconic films it tries to imitate.

The story follows a special operations team sent to a secret military lab for a cleanup mission. Their job is to cover up evidence of an experiment gone horribly wrong-an experiment involving a mad scientist, gene manipulation, ancient alien DNA, and who knows what else. The result is a creature that looks like the xenomorph from Aliens, has the head of a Predator, and was created in a lab for military purposes, much like the experiments by the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil. Now, the creature has escaped, is on a killing spree, and only the special ops team stands between it and the rest of the world.

The influence of the 1986 movie Aliens is especially obvious. The weapons, the looks of the multi-level facility, the creature and its offsprings, some of the characters, the core story, the music, the sound effects, and even parts of the dialogue are straight out of Aliens. But while Aliens had relatively few logical gaps, Alien Lockdown is full of them. Many events make no sense or happen for no apparent reason, pulling you out of the story. I often found myself confused and needing time to figure out what was going on or what had just happened.

If you love alien creature movies, Alien Lockdown might be worth watching-but only if it's free. While I've definitely seen worse films, I wouldn't recommend spending a penny on this one.

In a top-secret military facility, a team of scientists under the command of Dr. Woodman (John Savage) are developing a "super soldier" blending several DNAs including alien DNA. When the experiment goes wrong, a group of elite soldiers are assigned by the military Anslow (Martin Kove) to exterminate the lethal creatures created by Dr. Woodman.

"Alien Lockdown" is another poor production of the Sci-Fi Channel. The screenplay is a mess, there is no character development, the cinematography is awful and the CGI of the predator-like creature follows the usual standard of this channel. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Criatura" ("Creature")

The film begins with narration telling us about a meteor that crashed on Earth thousands of years ago. People in the area found a large emerald-like gem that turned out to have "special powers". Of course it changed hands over the years and yadda yadda yadda, finally ending up buried and only rumored to exist in legend. We cut to the present, and a team of archaeologists unearth a fabled crate/trunk/arc that turns out to contain the gem. Then, quicker than we can wink, we've changed plots and we're in a secret government mountain lair where scientists are working on a "super-soldier" that is a genetic manipulation of 100 different species, incorporating the traits of each that are most appropriate to killing things and surviving while being attacked. Of course, this beastie gets loose, and the bulk of Alien Lockdown concerns a Special Forces military group that infiltrates the secret government facility and attempts to take care of business. Eventually the plots are tied together more firmly, but it takes awhile.

Alien Lockdown is wildly uneven. Some aspects are excellent and other aspects are pretty miserable. At times it becomes unintentionally funny. But overall, this is an enjoyable little low-budget sci-fi/horror/action flick, primarily recommended for hardcore fans of that genre combination who try to see everything made.

For me, the most consistently positive aspect of the film was the lighting and cinematography. Through a combination of unusual lighting and film processing schemes, director Tim Cox achieves a very refreshing and aesthetically pleasing variety of colors and textures. Cox, by the way, was also responsible for another Sci-Fi Channel film that I enjoyed even more, Larva (2005), which also had interesting lighting and cinematography. Some scenes in Alien Lockdown have a golden yellow/brown/orange glow. Others emphasize different colors. Many lean towards monochromaticism. By the end of the climax, Cox has cinematographer John S. Bartley almost shooting in black & white, with just a slight tint. Colors are very important to the film--there is some important dialogue at one point about red and green. A more studied look at the film from a color symbolism perspective might prove revealing.

The cinematography is good for other reasons, too. For example, there is some very interesting hand-held work that is effectively employed to amp up the tension of a scene where two characters are trapped in a cage. And there are some unusual subtle touches, such as a pinpoint of light from a laser scope that stays on a character during a closely framed talking heads dialogue scene.

At the beginning of the film, I thought I was in for quite a treat. The film starts with a beautiful orange sky as we pan over dark mountains. Even though we next hear some slightly convoluted dialogue, which is usually a bad sign, the visuals remain attractive enough to override any mounting disappointment. The next scene is a very unique sequence of "warring Romans" silhouetted against a red background, then we move to the present (well, or questionably the future, due to later clues) and an Indiana Jones-ish adventure flavor. I was completely in the palm of Tim Cox' hand at this point; I was fully geared up for a relatively obscure 10 out of 10.

Unfortunately, things take a turn south not long afterward as we encounter what turns out to be the core of the plot--the super-soldier government stuff I mentioned above. Actually, this section isn't too bad until the Special Forces "commandos" arrive on the scene. There are a couple problems with this middle section of the film, the main one being that Cox and his army of writers do not let us get to know the characters except for the extremely attractive leader, Talon (Michelle Goh).

With such a collection of writers, you'd think there would be more of a plot to the middle of the film. But instead, we're treated to a series of random Aliens (1986)/Starship Troopers 2 (2004)-like scenes. There is a lot of searching through similar-looking corridors and rooms. There are a lot of weapons and "macho code talk". It had all the excitement of 30 minutes of padding.

To make this section slightly worse, the dialogue is riddled with clichés and ridiculous non-sequiturs. Take for example this "intellectual" exchange between Talon and token "evil genius" Dr. Woodman (John Savage, looking an awful lot like Brad Dourif to me):

Woodman: "This is a morality tale involving all of humanity. And you will be living out the first chapter."

Talon: "You better start making sense real fast. Stop with all this philosophical b.s."

Woodman: "After you've studied your humanities, and history, and mathematics at he levels I have, there is no other explanation. This is light against darkness, right against wrong, good against evil, only now, we are not dictating the rules!"

But things improve quite a bit again by the time we get to the climax, even though the monster is a not-very-veiled amalgamation of Alien and Predator--we even get a moment out of Alien 3 (1992) with a "near kiss" between the beastie and our heroine. There is good gore throughout the film, if you're into that, and the plot gets better as we learn of a couple double crosses that make the rest of the film more interesting in retrospect.

As a veteran viewer of all Nu Image B movie crapola this was a very entertaining movie. The story is not that special, everyone that was renting flicks in the 80's and early 90's can dream a plot about an underground facility , a monster and a crack team of soldiers. However for B movie and certainly NU IMAGE standards the production values are high (sets, fx) and the cast is rather good. Especially the female lead that is convincing. Of course one could wonder what a James Marshall or John Savage do in these kind of movies. Monster is a ripoff of predator but the twist later on in the film with the beastie is rather nice. It is worth a rent and a view, you can do a lot worse with the infamous one word titles from nu image ( it is called Creature in the Netherlands) that seem to specialize nowadays in big ass creatures and is actually competing with UFO films in the race to be the king of the B movies.