PrimeWire

Now I know what it would be like to watch Alien on molly.

This was both much better than expected and not very good. I am totally not a fan of “B” movies, but this is the best bad SF movie I can recall in years (meaning I didn’t feel at the end like I should get a refund for stealing it). It’s not existential horror, but it leans heavily on the unreliable narrator; between that and regular servings of body horror, it does portray an unhinged protagonist pretty well. But it abandons (literally erases) all that to get through the final girl survival sequence. That’s my biggest overall criticism of the film: It never sticks to the bit. On the other hand, that might be by design. I see a lot of reviews saying it could have been great, but I have the sense it saves itself from being much worse by not trying harder.

The acting is not bad, given what they have to work with. The female lead is a little “I’m really a model” stiff, but everyone else does a professional enough job of dialing in their death scenes. There is mercifully little dialog. I know it was a 90 minute film, but it felt like a 20 minute short.

The cinematography is the best part (unless you’re epileptic, in which case you will not survive). I especially enjoyed the lighting and color palette. It’s like being in a black-light saturated discotheque, in space. The special effects are mostly quite good (especially the horror effects), save for one scene when they are artfully screaming “this is where we quote John Carpenter’s The Thing.”

The plot is the worst part. Through a sequence of cliched plot twists that somehow cancel each other out, it arrives at a storyline somehow incoherent and predictable at the same time. There are some jump-scares, but no surprises. But there is one memorable case of trope subversion that I found very endearing, in which the obligatory medical robot looks for all the world like a tamagotchi xenomorph. In fact, that might have saved the whole film for me, a wink and a smile from the director that tells us this is an homage and a vanity project, and not to judge it too seriously or too harshly.

Wait… I just realized: There’s no cat! I take it all back, this movie sucks!