Watching this movie is like watching a high school production. I sat their rooting for the actors to do well, but the script and nonexistent budget finally took their toll.
The story opens in 2069, some sixty years after the main action of the film. A reporter prowls through an abandoned house and finds a diary, but the pages are missing. Determined to get her story, she drives cross country to visit Sarah, the main character.
Sarah is now about ninety years old and has been in a mental hospital for decades because of her insistence that what wiped out her town on 09-09-09 was the work of aliens, not a natural disaster. Kelly Pendygraft plays Sarah as both old and young woman. She's a good actress, but her old age makeup doesn't work. Worse yet, over the course of the story about Old Sarah we see her in daylight (a big mistake) and in closeup (a worse one).
Sarah tells the reporter how back in 2009 her former boyfriend Deke (Bryan Brewer, who also wrote the screenplay) came back to town after serving ten years in prison.
Deke's homecoming is not a happy event. Sarah is confused. His mother is hostile and rejecting. The sheriff (the fine character actor Lochlyn Munro) tells him to get out of town. His old buddies are nowhere near happy to see him.
But the plot thickens because a meteor struck down just outside of town. For economic reasons the meteor's arrival, like too much of the action, takes place off-screen. Soon creatures that reminded me of the monsters from 1958's THE BRAIN EATERS are crawling about taking over the minds and bodies of the townspeople (again, mostly off-screen).
Soon the creatures have almost total control of the town (echoing the paranoia of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and IT CONQUERED THE WORLD). The highways are blocked off and nobody can get in or out of town. Of course, we learn this thanks to a conversation over a police radio instead of actually seeing it happen.
What's peculiar is that as I'm typing this it sounds like a strong premise for a screenplay. And it is. But it just doesn't develop.
There's no pacing to the story, and never a sense of urgency as events unfold. The first attack by one of the monsters is based on its crawling up a man's pants leg...but he doesn't notice until it sticks its head out of his collar.
The town is cut off from the outside world and there's no communication, but Sarah's cell phone gets a call from a supporting character at a crucial points. The infected people are like raging zombies until it's convenient for the narrative for them to speak quite articulately. Although there's no getting in or out of the town, traffic on the main highway through it proceeds normally. A main supporting character sacrifices himself nobly, but his doing so has no real impact on the narrative flow. After the final siege against the monster several characters are established as alive and well, but we never learn what happens to them. And the way that people who have been taken over by the monsters can be cured is beyond belief. And nobody in the entire town has license plates on their vehicles, either front or back.
The "special effects" are ludicrous. Flames are green. And the footage of a "burning" house has to be seen to be believed.
The story ends up in 2069 with the reporter leaving Sarah and driving to set up a sequel. Stranger still, a major character reappears in a scene that provides way more questions than answers.
If director Howard Wexler had access to a decent budget (and the services of a good script doctor to tighten up the screenplay) he'd possibly have the chops to make a very decent thriller. I watched OUTBREAK on cable this week and was reminded of how $50 million and an awesome cast can't redeem a jumbled script. But Wexler was probably working with a budget literally under 1% of that, or less.
Parents' note: the film is unrated. No profanity, no nudity, and the violence and alien attack scenes shouldn't upset anyone junior high age or older.
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