Alien Agent

Alien Agent is a remarkable achievement. Somehow this movie is too good to laugh at while being too awful to enjoy. It sits upon a pinnacle of unique mediocrity that turns it’s 95-minutes into a joyless death march of tedium. I’ve watched far worse movies, but have rarely had a less enjoyable viewing experience.

The plot seems harmless enough. An anonymous rural area inhabited almost entirely by horny bumpkins who are hoping to ravish 18-year-old waitresses like Julie (Emma Lahana) is infested by evil aliens led by the very attractive and deadly Isis (Amelia Cooke). The evil aliens are trying to build a wormhole so that they can conquer the Earth. They are aided by some remarkably inept mercenaries and a superbly sniveling engineer, Roderick (Kim Coates), who, being bitter at a lifetime of rejection, casts his lot with the aliens. He also has the hots for Julie.

The only guy that doesn’t have the hots for Julie is the noble Alien Agent Rykker (Mark Dacascos), who is of course an alien good guy. Julie immediately gets the hots for Ryker, who turns out to have been involved with Isis. During the course of the movie, Rykker slaps around a country bumpkin that attempts to ravish the fair Julie. The bumpkin sooths his ego by smoking pot near a lake. Unfortunately the lake is the target of a meteorite carrying the evil alien commander Saylon (Billy Zane) who possesses the bumpkin’s body and takes charge.

So all of this should be a great action movie with a bit a science fiction used to justify the mayhem. Yet strangely the action falls flat. All of the state of the art stunts, car chases, shootouts and whup-ass martial arts thud instead of thrill. It’s entirely the fault of the scriptwriter, Vlady Pyldish, who seems to have forgotten that action decorates a story but doesn’t substitute for one. So most of the action is there for actions sake, it’s just trying to fill in the emptiness.

Alien Agent becomes so pointless that one longs for the highbrow art of Steven Segal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. This is truly remarkable because Alien Agent has equally good fight scenes and a better cast compared to Segal’s or Van Damme’s movies. What’s missing is a point to all of the mayhem. This is where the tedium begins and it never leaves.

Even the all too brief nudity is gratuitous to the extreme. There’s a scene in which two teenagers are making out (believe me, there is nothing original in this flick) by the lake. A lot of action happens around the teens but they aren’t there for that. The boy is cast in order to take off a girl’s shirt and the girl is cast so her shirt can be taken off. It’s all done so badly that the Friday the Thirteenth movies are subtle masterpieces of erotica in comparison. A later shower scene does show a very nice little bottom and is truly the high point of the movie but it’s only a temporary relief from the grinding tedium.

Alien Agent may have been a more enjoyable movie if the actors were worse and the production values were lower. It may have acquired a campy and enjoyable awfulness that is the saving grace of a lot of science fiction movies or action movies such as the deliciously bad Kill and Kill Again. Unfortunately, the actors were too professional to give the script the acting it deserved so both they and the viewer were doomed to suffer.