Alien Siege (2018)

After an alien spacecraft destroys Washington, D.C., the residents of a small town must fight off a unit of alien soldiers on the hunt for the President of the United States and the mysterious device he's carrying after his escape chopper crash lands nearby.

REVIEW: Alien Siege is the first 2018 Asylum-released movie that I haven’t really liked. The acting is about average for an Asylum production, with some actors doing better than others but nobody really being painfully bad like in some Asylum productions, and the CG special effects for the alien spaceships look fantastic by their standards, and the directing itself is serviceable for this type of low budget fare.

Unfortunately, that's where the things I enjoy end.

Even though the acting was serviceable, the characters themselves are written to be so incredibly flat and boring that it makes it difficult to follow them for the movie's runtime and actually care about anything that's happening to them. Just seconds after the movie was over, not one single character here stood out in my memory. On top of that, the design of the aliens is unimaginative and uninteresting. They pretty much just look like humans in thick black body armor, with a visual blurring effect added on top of them. Considering this movie is about an alien invasion you would think that at least that area of the movie would have been a bit more interesting, but is was just a visual bore. It makes that even more frustrating when you factor in that toward the end we actually get to see one of the aliens without that humanoid body armor on and it genuinely looks fantastic, both in terms of its design as well as the quality of the effects for it, so it really makes me question why we couldn't have them looking like that during the entire movie.

Lastly, this movie plays out pretty much exactly as you would expect it to, with no surprises and not even really any stand out memorable scenes or moments. Really, just everything about this entire production can be summed up in two words - bland and boring.

If even only one of those above issues had been fixed I think I would have enjoyed Alien Siege a fair bit more. As it stands, in a year where Asylum has been knocking it out of the park with every single release so far, this one comes as a major knot in an otherwise perfect line. But at the end of the day I don't think there's been a single year where I've loved every single movie Asylum has put out so this was bound to happen at some point, and overall this is still a much, much stronger year for fantastic Asylum movies than the last couple years have been.

I just hope this is a missed step as opposed to the start of a tumble that continues for the rest of the year.

4/10 rooms in the Psych Ward