Alien Predator (2018)

A black ops reconnaissance team is sent to investigate the crash of an unidentified aircraft. When they arrive, they find strange markings and residue visible only in infrared. As the team gets deeper in and tries to figure out the source of the markings, they discover that they are being hunted by an alien expedition to Earth. 

REVIEW: Alien Predator is Asylum's latest mockbuster, obviously cashing in on the recent release of The Predator, although also acting just as much as a mockbuster of the original Predator movie, which I have no problems with at all as anybody who knows even a little about me knows that I love Asylum movies. They're my bread and butter when it comes to low budget direct-to-video B-Movies.

With this one, an alien ship crashes in the jungle and after the first team sent in to assess the situation disappears, a second team goes in to find out what the hell is going on. While the acting is about what you would expect from Asylum fare, the characters themselves are actually pretty interesting and unique from one another, enough so that even though they're all dressed the same and wearing warpaint on their faces, they're still easy to distinguish from one another, with a couple of them actually being downright likeable and enjoyable.

My big issue is that it takes a very long while into the movie (about half an hour from the end) before we get to actually see the aliens, and when we finally do get to see them they resemble something more like giant hulking robots than actual aliens. Kind of a lackluster design, IMO. Add to that, they lumber around so slowly that it's hard to really picture them being as big of a threat as they're played up to be. However, the effects themselves for them are done to campy low budget perfection by way of man-in-suit practical effects, which I always appreciate, and there are a couple scenes where we do get to see them without their robotic helmets on, which I wish was how we got to see them in every scene as those designs were so much better and the prosthetics for them looked amazing.

Luckily, despite the aliens being off-screen for most of the movie, this movie does actually have enough other interesting stuff going on during it that helped keep my attention. Various situations that the soldiers find themselves in, alien tech that they come across, mutilated bodies strung up, that kind of stuff definitely went a long way in filling that void left by having the aliens kept off-screen. Say what you will about this movie, but at least it was never boring to me as there was almost always something interesting happening every few minutes, with the small downtime between those scenes being spent with mostly-enjoyable characters.

As far as Asylum movies go, this one is slightly above average. There are by far plenty of way better ones out there, especially from early in this year alone. However, there are also plenty plenty more that are painfully worse, and at the end of the day at least Alien Predator is never dull or boring, despite whatever issues it does have, and that, to me, is one of the most important things in a low budget B-Movie.

7/10 rooms in the Psych Ward