Glowing Aliens

Alton Meyer is an eight-year old boy with eyes that shoot beams brighter than a flashlight with a hundred batteries. His hands glow, too. Wish I had glowing hands. No reason. Just seems like it’d be neat.

Alton, his dad and a friend are being hunted by the Feds, cops, and a wacko religious cult in Texas who think Alton is the next Messiah du jour. They’re on a cross-state run to get Alton to a specific location in Florida where some unknown mind-bending stuff is about to hit the fan. And there’s a lot of fan-hitting that happens on the way there.

Meanwhile the FBI raids The Ranch, where the cult holds sermons and stockpiles heavy artillery. Seems the pastoral babblings contained encoded satellite transmissions given to the head cult leader by Alton, who was raised at the compound after mom dumped him there when his “powers” became too strong for her to deal with. The penalty for having accessing such encrypted information, says Agent Paul Sevier, is so severe, the Government has yet to think up a suitable punishment. Yeow to that!

A spectacular display of Alton’s powers comes at a gas station where his dad and friend stop for potato chip supplies. Wearing goggles (so people can’t see his high beam peepers), he brings down a satellite in a shower of flaming chunks on top of them. The Feds are upset as it was an important satellite, one with the sole purpose of detecting nuclear events anywhere in the world. That, and it was freakin’ expensive.

Stopping to pick up mom, the fugitives are relentlessly tracked by the cult, who manage to violently kidnap Alton. The Feds kidnap Alton from the cult and it’s here the bright-eyed boy reveals his secrets to Agent Sevier. Alton tells him there’s a world above the one they’re currently on, and that he belongs with “his people.” Dutifully freaked out, Sevier manages to get the kid back to the dad, who in an nerve-wracking car chase sequence, gets Alton to the aforementioned coordinates, which happen to be in the Florida Everglades. (You don’t see ‘em, but there were probably hundreds of bugs in the swamp. Ick.)

And it’s here Alton rejoins “his people” who materialize after a nuclear-esque event. (Too bad the don’t have a satellite to detect it.) Midnight Special (2016) is slow burn intense up to that point, but that scene is the money shot. Who knew the aliens could be this cool? Who knew this movie with its lackluster title would be this cool? You will once you watch it (glowing eyes not required.)

Dashboard Aliens

Invasion (2005) is an n entire movie shot almost entirely with no edits via a police car dashboard cam. I should be so bold.

A meteor with an alien in it crashes on the outskirts of town. If you get near it, you turn into a zombie. Some people get near it. Interesting premise presented in a reality context. (Looking at people/aliens/zombies through a police cam at night is freakin’ freaky, man.)

But Invasion has a tough time holding your interest past the first 15 minutes. They have the police car driving through an endlessly winding back road endlessly. There’s a screaming prom queen out there, earning her title the hard way, when the meteor craziness went down. Somehow she ends up in the cop car and screams for help on the radio.

This frustrated conversation is hysterical. (She tells the sheriff back at the station to cram his badge where meteors don’t shine, using words unbefitting of someone with her royal pedigree.) I liked her. Not the endlessly winding roads, though. Maybe if some of the roads were a bit more straight.

Sasquatch Charged With Assault

In Assault of the Sasquatch (2009), poachers with questionable hygiene and chew tobacco stained teeth snare the iconic fuzzball in one of their illegal traps meant for gummi bears and chocolate raccoons.

Getting Sas inside a carrier truck and prepped to sell to a big game hunter, the head poacher is caught red-footed and hauled off to jail and the truck driven back to the small town, where Sasquatch pounds his way out and sticks around for some payback.

The police station, holding a violent criminal that ties back into the game warden’s past, becomes a refuge while Sasquatch circles and attacks over and over. (He was probably in the military before becoming a woodland tourist attraction.)

If that wasn’t enough to set the eyeballs a’rollin’, a former druggie chick/stripper, now working as an office assistant for the cop that got her off the streets, does some kung-fu street boxing with the harried beast, and actually gets in a few solid punches. Then again, this Sasquatch, with dreads and a human tooth necklace (at least that what it looked like to me), didn’t look too tough.

I never thought I’d say this about a Bigfoot movie, but the sub-plot with the cop and the violent criminal was more interesting than the monster. I need to get my priorities straightened out.

Hell in the Cell

Described as “John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 but with a supernatural twist,” Last Shift is a feel-good horror movie pitting a chick cop against a demonic ghost. I know what you’re thinking – is the chick cop gonna drop top? We’ll have to wait and see when Last Shift is finally released on DVD sometime during the day on October 6, 2015.

Here’s what they’re telling us/me/you: “Officer Jessica Loren has been assigned to wait for a Hazmat team to pick up bio-hazardous waste from the station’s armory. But unbeknown to Jessica, cult Leader John Michael Paymon has haunted the department ever since he and two of this followers committed suicide a year ago to date. And now, Jessica is about to find out how dangerous they can be when she’s left alone on this…last shift.”

This one was originally titled Paymon: The King of Hell. I like that a hell of a lot more than The Last Shift, which left me with a “gum didn’t come out of the machine” look on my face. Why someone actually thought Last Shift is a better title is supreme bafflement of the highest order.

There have been other horror movies with a similar theme. The one that burps to the surface of my mind is 2011’s Inkubus, starring Freddy Krueger (or “Robert Englund”) as the title character.

Here’s what that one is all about: “Inkubus tells the story of a skeleton crew working the final shift at a soon to be demolished police station. The night takes a gruesome turn when the demon Inkubus calmly walks into the station holding the severed head of a murdered girl. Inkubus toys with the crew, allowing himself to be restrained, and begins to proudly confess to his litany of crimes, some dating back to the Middle Ages.”

No doubt Inkubus is gonna get a ticket for murder. But to toy with cops? He’s looking at a life sentence.

Demonic Tenants

In The Landlord (2009) a property owner can’t collect the rent as Hell demons keep eating his tenants. But that’s his job – to keep the cupboards full of chow, or else the demons will eat him. Not seeing an up side to all of this, especially when the landlord has to clean the bloody mess after each meal. At least he gets to keep the damage deposit.

Tyler (the landlord) inherited the three-story old house from his devil-worshiping parents. (I wonder if my parents do that kind of stuff? Looking at how I turned out, I’d have to say MORE THAN LIKELY.)

The two demons are constantly feenin’ for human fixin’s. Tyler’s not totally on board with this but plays waiter for their insatiable hunger because, hey, DEMONS. If that wasn’t a mouthful to deal with, all this bloody body buffet is drawing the attention of the cops, one of which is Tyler’s sister. Gasp out loud!

The Landlord is an ultra low-budget comedy horror flick that, while inherently dumb, is momentarily entertaining. The demons look totally fake, though. To see a real one, ask your devil-worshiping parents.