Some might say if you’ve seen one alien abduction troped movie you’ve seen them all, but Extraterrestrial is truly a blast to watch, provided you stay to the ending. It might seem like your slogging through the first third of the movie but the payoff will be a movie that’s just fun to watch. There’s at least 1 great actor who puts on a stand out performance and it’s one of the reasons I decided to write a review on Extraterrestrial. And in this case, I highly recommend staying because the final parting shot even gives a great nod to one of the best known genre busting features, The X-Files.

Extraterrestrial blends a found footage movie and for lack of a better phrasing a regular third person looking in from the outside footage type of movie and it works very well. At first my mind poo pooed the two types of footages being used as there are points in the movie you might wonder just who is filming all this but this qualm will soon be forgotten. But Extraterrestrial doesn’t try to categorize itself with the hybrid way the movie is filmed and works out to benefit Extraterrestrial.

The beginning of the movie reminded me of the beginning of the original Urban Legends but instead of a girl in her SUV it’s a distressed girl rambling up to a remote roadside gas station apparently in terror for some yet undiscovered reason. She pleads with the store keeper to let her in to use the phone. The storekeeper flips off the open sign and announces that the store is closed. I mean it is the middle of the night and it makes sense, even though it’s a bit irresponsible to leave panicked girl outside, a real dick move. She spots a telephone booth just outside the store and goes to make a phone call to 911. While making the call we see a flash of light as she looks skyward and moments later the phone booth falls from the sky to come crashing to the ground in great crescendo.

From here the movie cuts to a tropey blasé scene with a bunch of late teenagers getting on acting just like a bunch of late teenagers might act similar to many others which might be categorized as trope for the genre. Once the slow burn first third of the movie is slogged through things get interesting. We get the teens finally making their way to the cabin in the woods locale, a vacation house currently with a for sale sign out front as the parents of one of the teens is going through a divorce. The lifelong friends recount the many memories they’ve spent in the vacation house when they were younger and long for simpler days as approaching college and work life start to intercede.

A pair of the teenagers, a female pair, decide to go for a walk in the surrounding area with their beautiful Irish Setter (it’s a dog, and yes it’s gonna die) and the dog gets excited and makes a break for it. As the young women chase the dog they find a ramshackle hut in the woods. They enter the shack upon hearing the sounds of the dog inside and stumble into a marijuana grow operation. In a very questionable move considering the locale they’ve just found themselves one of the girls decides to try and steal a bagged up trove of goodies and here enters Michael Ironsides character in a World War 2 gas mask armed with a shotgun demand to know what the hell is going on. Turns out to be the neighbor who remembers the girl from years past and for one of the girls that questionable move becomes a boon.

From this point on Extraterrestrial gets very good with the start of another trope, the supposed meteor in the sky, or thought to be meteor that comes flying overhead to come crashing to the ground.

From this point in the movie gets VERY good. Truly enjoyable to watch and now that I’ve covered in summary the first half of the movie, I have to turn off spoiler mode and preclude you from any further details. Just know that if you’re a fan of the genre the rest of the movie will be satisfying and if you’re just an action junkie waiting for something to happen, bright lights, loud noises, and a bunch of running around in fear is coming up to satisfy you as well.

Extraterrestrial was released in 2014 and directed by Colin Minihan. Written by Colin Minihan, Stuart Ortiz, and The Vicious Brothers. Featuring a great stand out performance by Brittany Allen, and also featuring Freddie Stroma, Gil Bellows, Michael Ironsides, and a great ending parting shot by MacKenzie Gray. The iMDB blurb is as follows:

A group of friends on a weekend trip to a cabin in the woods find themselves terrorized by alien visitors.

iMDB Storyline

So if UFO and/or abduction movies are a subgenre you like, this is one of the better ones I’ve seen.

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