Review of Extraterrestrial (2014) by Drew S — 28 Mar 2015

Every cabin horror clichés known to men and beyond, now with unidentifiable unrelatable characters, also alien. Extraterrestrial must have found every 90s slasher flicks and stereotypical abduction stories and then decided to mix them together without a shred of originality. No cliche is safe, from people staring at something off-screen to slow yet inevitable jump scares. However, the worst aspect is the characters, who are immensely unlikeable stupid collage kids with addiction tendency and vocabulary consisting of juvenile swearing.

As it is written in template of horror films, a bunch of volatile young adults go to a cabin in the wood. There they will have a fateful encounter with, an entity which the title cleverly conceals, aliens. These characters are by far some of the worst on-screen personas in horror, or any genre. The actors have no charisma or acting prowess to develop their roles, nor does the shallow script allow them to. They act and talk in arrogant irritating manners, usually resorting to profanities to poorly express themselves.

There isn't thrill to be had here. Every set-up is painfully predictable. Those dark corners, with especially flickering lights, chances are something will come from there. Pace is also slow, which is unwisely spent on people muttering gibberish or blankly stare at random stuffs. It also has the audacity to switch to found footage perspective at some points, people would not appreciate having closer look on the obnoxious character and have them spew bad language at them. Man, pork that seat.

The best thing it may offer is the visual, when it's not shaking uncontrollably, it's admittedly pretty good. It has cool color palette and the ambiance works well for the setting. The bloody practical effect has created sinister and believable look. However, audio are unimaginative, it spams too much of grim techno noises and Inception whooping sound. Plot is littered by oddities, it doesn't try to go beyond the formulaic development and instead just create weak narrative that doesn't clarify anything.

The film isn't even cynically humorous, it's brashly cringe inducing at best. With little to no appeal, Extraterrestrial doesn't warrant any visit.