If the mutant bear from Prophecy fucked the alien from The Creeping Unknown and they had a cub which was half skinned Paddington and half the flesh carpet from Society, you’d get a thing that looks a lot like the Dan Martin creation which is the big bad of this low-budget s-f horror item.
Shot on Malta but set in the US – with English/Irish actresses playing in pretty good Yankvoice – this debut feature from writer-director Sam Walker has alpha social media diva Deidre (Lucy Martin), rich kidette Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) and tagalong pet shop clerk Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) head to a desert hideaway that looks a bit like the one where bad things happened in Revenge in order to watch a meteor shower which Deidre thinks will mostly make a neat backdrop for her postings. Something oily and smelly plops into the pool and turns out to be alive and divisive – Charlotte wants to look after it and Deidre wants to kill it … though their positions reverse as the creature exerts a strange influence over the women.
The personal stories are credible, but even the nice girl isn’t that nice … and we get the picture about the nasty one and the sidekick well before anything starts to happen out of the ordinary. Some elements are wildly inventive, but it defaults to overfamiliar stuff (black oil leaking from eyes) and I kind of miss the era of Inseminoid and XTRO where British alien impregnation movies didn’t completely pretend to be American. It has a good look, thanks to great locations, and an excellent score by Lucretia Dal which will get her a lot more work.
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