Alien Apocalypse

Remember the "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" series (c. 1979)? Well this has a bit of that to it. Astronauts "Ivan" (Bruce Campbell) and "Kelly" (Renée O'Connor) land on Earth to find humanity enslaved by giant insects who love wood - even more than biting off the heads of naughty people. Well "Ivan" is having one of this, so he gathers a tiny gang and off they go in search of the last US President "Demsky" (Peter Jason) in the hope that he can galvanise what's left of the population to fight back. Along their travels they meet freedom fighters and collaborators alike before the predicable set-too with the rather engaging beasties who speak perfect English, not too adept with their sonic pulse guns and are quite conversational with their conquering. Campbell is hamming is up throughout (I hope) for the dialogue is pretty woeful - even the "I'm Spartacus" moment, which does raise a smile. The visual effects are pretty standard and the looks of bemusement when the enemy encounter (fairly effective) bows and arrows makes the film worth watching just for that. It's dreadful, yes - but if you aim low and expect very little then it's astonishingly acceptable for an admittedly over-long ninety minutes.

Well, Bruce Campbell was the absolute best person to cast in this, especially given the dialogue. It makes for a fun, tongue-in-cheek, entertaining film that you can watch from start to finish... ... no matter how bad it is... ... and it could have been better if it made different decisions. It is supposed to be campy, and it succeeds in being campy... but it shows the grasshoppers too soon and it shows too much of them. Dominant alien invading race or not... they should have done the intelligent low budget thing and kept the critters in the shadows as much as possible. If they did that it would have been more serious... for a campy Sci-Fi film. That's ultimately the difference between decent z-grade and horrible z-grade, knowing when to hide the critters and knowing when to reveal it. But it's still campy fun, even if the director made poor decisions.