Lurking about the various streaming sites (and also by browsing Amazon recommendations, if you have an order history like mine), i’d hard not to notice that alongside monster movies, one of the safest go-to themes for a b-movie – especially if it’s a made for TV – it’s aliens.
Yes, the “subgenre” it’s not as popular as it was in the ’90s, thanks to tech billionaries indirectly making the point that the “space age” it’s not coming anytime soon, and also making us quite undesirable to contact by the prospective of hypothetical extraterrestrial, but it’s clearly still cheap, fast and popular enough, since i keep on stumbling on “army vs aliens” i never heard of but that managed to get DVD releases, with confusingly non-descript and generic cover artworks.
Though i found this one, Invasion Roswell, on Amazon Prime Video, under his other – and far more generic – title of Exterminators. Despite not being about giant spiders.
But worry not, it has another, slightly more fitting alternate title, “Battle: Earth”. Or the german DVD one, “Exterminators VS Aliens”.
In 1947 the US army shot down an UFO in Roswell, and secretly trained elite squads over the generations in case of another alien attack. 66 years later, the aliens do actually come back to get some revenge on the Earthicans. But guess that “anti-alien commando battalions” thing got shelved, as the only ones trained to fight the alien menace have to be called back from sweet ol’ retirement.
So it’s exactly like Red, minus the John Malkovich and the importance of being such.
The reunion part it’s about as awkward, just with a bunch of mostly remembered old (but not THAT old) TV actors slumming in one of the stock-iest TV b-movie about aliens you can get, as it checks out all the boxes. It has the grey little men aliens, Roswell (of course), people talking about anal probes, the main operation resorting to the usual Death Star manouver to deal with the mothership, ‘Murica remaining as the only standing front as the ships destroy pretty much everything else in the planet, with all the utterly predictable dialogues for the “rag tag unit” of stereotypes to deliver.
It’s about what you’d expect from an alien TV movie (especially with titles like these), all the cheapo CG for the starships, special effects, the obvious green screneed backgrounds and digital establishing shots of army bases, but it’s not as badly budgeted as you would guess, since they at least managed to have humanoid robo-suited aliens played by actors with actual costumes, and even an hybrid man-alien thing mask and suit, not much, but more than what you usually get.
It’s really run-of-the-mill, but it’s entertaining enough, the acting is uneven but the movie as a whole it’s crappy to the point of being somewhat enjoyable, there’s enough action and a decent pace to lead the viewver through the utterly unremarkable plot and shitty script, which is really Indipendence Day verbatim.
Not really that surprising for a TV movie, but still.
It’s not good, but it’s at least watchable, i can say that about Invasion Roswell/Exterminators, as in, go into it with very low expectations and you might get some mild not-boredom out it.
I’ve said this so many times i feel it doesn’t mean shit anymore, but yes, “i’ve seen worse”. I really did.
Really don’t have much to say about this one, i’t’s really what you would expect of it.
Guess in the not so distant future i’ll dig up the DVD for “Battalion” from whatever disc rack i slapped it in, in case you want more alien invasion budget movie reviews.
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