Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
Cletus, Clifton and Billy Bob are a crew of hardcore RedNeckians doing some hootin, hollerin’, drankin’ and shootin’ when a falling star falls from the sky. Right off the bat Cletus knew it was one of them there aliens so they go to investigate. I might have that wrong now that I think about it. I think Cletus actually went out to barn to check on his cheatin’ wife Meghan (Ashley Bates) who was fooling around with the local muscle bound idjit Braden (Cuyle Carvin), until Ashley’s supreme white trashy mom Rita (Hilma Folkowski) intervened and killed Cletus for crimes he was about to commit against her daughter. NOW the other three RedNeckians go to check out the crash that they knew was an alien. Guess what? It was an alien, and it just wants to fix its ship and go back home. But complications, that we won’t get into, require that Cheatin’ Meghan and White Trash Rita set up a competition featuring a very diverse crew of morons to do battle with this alien, an ‘Alien Opponent’ we will call it, for a cash reward.
The cash reward is 100 large, and this brings a laundry list of loons out of the woodwork to do battle with this alien. It’s a cast of virtually hundreds but of note is the profane preacher Father Mezullo (Roddy Piper), the slimy something or another Brooklyn (Jeremy London), Linea the Stripper (Adrienne LaValley) who happens to be sporting Lara Croft gear, and Lux the waitress (Tasia Jones) who carries a big gun that she clearly doesn’t know how to use.
So all these people, which also includes football players, cheerleaders, hicks, more idiots, and dummies… along with so many others… hunt the alien, which they all uniformly suck at, and encounter the alien and its many defense mechanisms, and die.
And that’s pretty much it as far as a narrative is concerned.
Repeat the search, find and die scenario over and over again for the next ninety or so minutes, toss in some banter which may be witty depending on your state of mind, but isn’t relevant to much that is going on no matter what your state of mind, then mix in some nice special effects, a little gore and wait until there’s only one left then roll the credits. And that, my friends, is ‘Alien Opponent’.
Written by John Doolan and directed by Colin Theys, we admire ‘Alien Opponent’ for succeeding in being what I think it was trying to be. That is creating a screwball, irreverent, off the wall action comedy with an alien in it. That doesn’t mean that we actually enjoyed ‘Alien Opponent’, oh good heavens no considering that screwball, irreverent, off the wall action comedies aren’t really my thing, but clearly this is a movie that isn’t taking itself at all serious with its focus being on the wacky characters populating this movie and thinking of clever ways to kill these wacky characters that populate this thing.
But as far as I was concerned I found the wacky characters in this movie more annoying than amusing, and since the wacky characters were about seventy percent of this movie, that means that I was pretty much annoyed seventy percent of the time while watching this movie. The other thirty percent consisted of watching these annoying characters die horribly, be it by virtual shark, Alien style impregnation, land mine, decapitation, dismemberment, evisceration or zombie, and obviously this was far more satisfying. I guess it all kind of goes hand in hand since the time was taken to make these characters intensely annoying, thus making watching them perish more enjoyable, but that was still an awful lot of annoyance to deal with.
But just because I wasn’t completely down with the wackiness of low brow comedy that was ‘Alien Opponent’, doesn’t mean you won’t be. Give it a shot if you feel the need.
