by Annette Basile
Worth: $10.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nathan Hill, Ira Chakraborty, Savita Bungay
Intro:
... may not be a great genre film, but it has plenty of moments of offbeat entertainment.
When Australian astronaut Ryan Van Hill-Song (Nathan Hill)… goes into space, he loses contact with NASA for at least 60 seconds. He returns home but he’s… well… changed. Something happened in that minute – and his wife Sadie (Ira Chakraborty) is freaking out…
This Australian genre offering is an odd creature. The grittiness often found in genre flicks is missing, and it plays out like an updated B picture – the sort of 1950s fare that you might have found, once upon a time, while channel surfing at 3am. The acting is wooden, and the dialogue is beyond cliché, but you stay anyway.
It’s fittingly set in Melbourne, home of perhaps the most compelling Australian UFO case in the books – Westall ‘66, as it’s become known – a mass UFO sighting where the witnesses were mostly school kids. It’s an intriguing case that never quite seeped into the national psyche, but it’s heavily referenced here, with Ryan stalking around the Westall school, looking for answers in the school’s UFO murals.
As Ryan and Sadie, Hill and Chakraborty are not particularly convincing, yet you hang in there, wanting to know what happened in that missing minute. Jamie Murgatroyd’s score gives Alien Love a lift, providing much-needed tension and atmosphere. But this film lacks the right dose of self-awareness and just like in those B pictures, there’s unintentional humour. Alien Love is not quite aware of its B-ness – or is it? There are moments that play like a parody of a 1950s sci-fi matinee (the portrayal of the Men – and Woman – in Black, for instance), and in these sequences, the film seems to wink at you in a meta moment; it might actually know what it is, and it ain’t Close Encounters.
Actor/co-writer Nathan Hill (a prolific indie filmmaker) has his fans, who will find something here. Alien Love may not be a great genre film, but it has plenty of moments of offbeat entertainment.
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