Submitted by the Philippines: The Missing

Eric is sort of like a Filipino Whitley Streiber, as a fellow creator, who was similarly traumatized by his experience as an alien abductee. Or was he? Maybe he was emotionally wounded by something else. Regardless, the past comes rushing back to him just when things start percolating with a co-worker in Carl Joseph E. Papa’s animated feature The Missing, which the Philippines selected as its official International Film Submission to the upcoming Academy Awards.

Eric has been carrying a torch for Carlo at the animation studio where they both work. They were about to finally have something like a date when his mother calls, asking him to check on his Uncle Rogelio, who has gone silent for an alarming period of time. On their way to a late dinner, they pop in on Rogelio, finding a fly-infested corpse in bed. While Carlo fetches help, Eric is suddenly re-abducted by the alien that previously snatched him away during his chaotic childhood.

Of course, Carlo is rather baffled by Eric’s disappearance. Unfortunately, he will apparently flake out on Carlo several more times, as the alien persistently hunts him, hoping to finish what he started years ago. However, viewers can discern perhaps something less extraterrestrial tormenting the young animator.

Papa’s message is a little heavy-handed, but it actually works better through the various styles of animation than it would in live-action. For instance, the mute Eric is literally depicted without a mouth and during flashbacks, Rogelio’s face is obscured by ominous scribbles. Most of the contemporary scenes are produced in a rotoscoped-style of animation, converted from live-action film cells. However, the flashbacks are rendered in a simplistic, almost South Park-like style. Yet, they certainly have a dark vibe.

UFOs, on MHz

The French Space administrations office for UFO investigations, known as GEPAN, developed such a flaky reputation, it rebranded several times, changing its acronym to SEPRA and then to GEIPAN. Didier Mathure was maybe part of the problem. The closed-minded director of CNES assigned him to be the interim head, in order to clear its cases and shut it down. However, Mathure ill-advisedly develops Fox Mulder-like tendencies in creators Clemence Dargent & Martin Douaire’s UFOs (a.k.a. OVNIs), which premieres tomorrow on MHz.

Mathure was an elite scientist at CNES until the rocket he dedicated the better part of his career to exploded after take-off. As penance, the slimy agency director transfers Mathure to GEPAN, with the clear expectation he will close it down, stifling all talk of UFOs in the process. However, the perverse combination of Mathure’s spectacularly bad PR skills and his naïve misapplications of scientific method have the opposite effect. Interest in UFOs boom, along with reports.

Mathure does not necessarily believe one way or the other, but veteran French Air Force officer Valerie Delbrosse does. In fact, she encourages (blackmails) Mathure to make his findings public. However, that would hurt his ex-wife Elise Conti’s prospects of securing a high-level appointment at the European space agency. Still, he is starting to admit there might be something to a handful of select cases his predecessor started investigating, before disappearing on a sudden leave of absence.

UFOs plays a lot of its X-Files-style business for laughs, particularly an alien-abducted flamingo and the bawdy postcards Mathure’s missing predecessor sends the staff, which they assume are clues. However, the underlying conspiracy narrative is still sufficiently interesting that it would probably still hold up if the tone were more serious. The late 1970s milieu adds a lot of funky texture (the references to the under-appreciated The Invaders are especially on-point), but the series sometimes fudges a little. Technically, Albert Barille’s Once Upon a Time…Space aired after Giscard’s presidency, but whatever.

Regardless, Melvil Poupaud, radically playing against type, is the engine that drive the show’s comedy. He is a lot like Fraser Crane—often painful to watch, but somehow, we keep rooting for him. He also has terrific chemistry with Geraldine Pailhas, who is highly entertaining when cutting him down to size. On the other hand, the shtickiness of Vera Clouseau (as the hippy dippy GEPAN receptionist-case interviewer) and Quentin Dolmaire (as the Trekker computer specialist) gets a little tiresome.

Slamdance ’22: We are Living Things

If there are aliens out there, they shrewdly select people for their close encounters. They only show themselves to the credibility challenged, like hermits, eccentrics, weirdos, Jimmy Carter, etc. Two conventional undocumented aliens—one from China, the other from Mexico—certainly qualify as marginalized and they have personal history that makes them believers in Antonio Tibaldi’s We are Living Things, which screens (online) as part of the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival.

Chuyao was smuggled to New York by a trafficking gang that still controls her, in typical trafficker ways. While servicing her tenement apartment, Solomon the handyman spots tell-tale signs of their mutual alien obsession. Considering her a kindred spirit, he starts watching over her. Soon, he suspects Tiger, her handler, has nefarious plans for her. However, Chuyao is instinctively distrustful of Solomon, as she is of nearly everyone in America.

Eventually, Tibaldi’s film turns into a road movie, with the two UFO-trackers searching for an abduction site with special personal meaning to Solomon. In many ways, Living Things could serve as an apt companion film to Encounter, but while one steadily debunks its paranormal aspects, the other keeps the door open to the possibility.

Proximity: Alien Abduction, but Different

Presumably, it would be expensive for extraterrestrial civilizations to attempt first contact or more ominously engage in abductions or even an invasion. Therefore, they need a darned good reason. Just messing with the listeners of Coast to Coast A.M. isn’t sufficient. It turns out there is a reason the Gray People have been popping-in on Earth and it makes for a heck of a third act revelation in director-screenwriter Eric Demeusy’s Proximity, which releases this Friday on VOD.

Isaac Cypress has a cool job with very little responsibility at NASA’s JPL facility, but he never really seriously considers the possibility of intelligent alien life, until he encounters it first-hand, losing three days in the process. As luck would have it, he happened to be filming a video diary during his abduction-encounter, so he has proof—sort of. Rather rashly, he posts his footage online, where it quickly goes viral. Much to his frustration, most of the subsequent media attention focuses on attempts to debunk him. However, it also allows him to connect with Sara, an attractive fellow abductee, who should be well out of his league. Of course, it also brings him to the attention of the UN’s evil Men-in-Black agency.

After escaping from the clutches of the UN’s MIB and their Tron-like motorcycle-driving androids, Cypress and Sara seek the help of Carl Miesner, a reclusive former abductee who has been monitoring alien transmissions and may have made contact. To get from Costa Rica (the site of the UN’s secret facility) to Miesner’s secret transmitter in British Columbia, they enlist the help of Zed, an off-the-grid hippy hacker.

In some ways, Proximity is obviously derivative of MIB, The X-Files, and maybe even WarGames a little. Plus, the score often sounds transparently “borrowed” from John Williams’ “Imperial Marches” from the Star Wars franchise. Yet, Demeusy has some huge surprises teed-up for viewers that you absolutely will not see coming. In fact, it is totally shocking where it goes, because it does not telegraph that inclination. It is actually really cool, but more narrow-minded audiences are likely to have a problem with it. It is also quite refreshing to see the villainous Men-in-Black are not Feds, but work for the United Nations (it also makes more sense, considering the lawlessness of UN “peace-keepers”).

Abduction: Scott Adkins & Andy On Fight Aliens

If you thought Communist monuments were creepy before, wait till you visit this “victory” park in Vietnam. It is not just militaristic propaganda, it serves as a portal for a sinister race of interdimensional aliens. They have kidnapped Scott Adkins’ daughter and Andy On’s wife. Not surprisingly, the action stars damn-well want their loved ones back in Ernie Barbarash’s Abduction, which opens today in Los Angeles.

When we meet Quinn, he is literally in a world of hurt. While he is fighting off drones controlled by a race of cloak-wearing alien overlords, while his daughter Lucy is trapped in a cage, wearing a lethal choker around her neck. Defenestrated by the aliens’ telekinetic powers, Quinn suddenly finds himself surfacing in the Vietnamese Victory fountain. After a few run ins with cops and doctors, Quinn discovers thirty-two years passed on Earth while he was struggling in the extra-dimensional realm.

Dr. Anna is probably the most compassionate physician on staff at the Vietnamese Belleview, but she still assumes Quinn is delusional, for obvious reasons. Then she has a chance encounter with Connor Wu. The expat American freelance hitman is slightly disappointed in the crime syndicate he was working for, because they kidnapped his wife Maya to sell to the aliens, because of some rare genetic code in her DNA. Obviously, Dr. Anna figures these two need to get together—and action fans will not disagree.

Granted, the quality of Abduction’s visual effects is unfortunate, but Tim Man’s fight choreography is as serious as a two-by-four to the side of your head. Barbarash expertly showcases the action chops of his two stars, Adkins and On, playing Quinn and Wu, respectively. Adkins also stretches a bit, going for some fish-out-of-water comedy in the first half, with mixed results. However, On really brings the seething heat as the guilt-ridden and deeply ticked-off Wu, like an alien-fighting John Wick, without the dog.

Truong Ngoc Anh (a.k.a. TNA) also has some interesting moments, especially during the wild third act, but this is definitely a manly beat-down kind of film. Believe it or not, screenwriter Mike MacLean’s Strieber-esque alien abduction material has a few interesting twists (but the SFX work admittedly does not do them any favors). Regardless, the reason to see the film is the martial arts spectacle put on by the stars and the first-class stunt team. You know its legit when both Adkins and the legendary Roger Corman are on-board as executive producers. Recommended as a surprisingly dark but highly enjoyable B-movie, Abduction opens today (6/7) at the Laemmle Playhouse 7.

The Recall: Wesley Snipes, Alien Abductee

If aliens were abducting people, you’d think they would opt for the best possible specimens or at least the representatively average. Instead, they seem to have a preference for moronic teenagers. The aliens are back again and they are perfectly welcome to take the five bickering teens spending a weekend by the lake in Mauro Borrelli’s The Recall (trailer here), which is now playing in New York and on iTunes.

Rob dragged mopey Charlie along on this weekend getaway hoping his girlfriend Kara’s best pal Annie will help take his mind off the now deceased love of his life. If things go according to plan, the vaguely metrosexual Brendan will be the fifth wheel, but he is obsessed with taking Bigfoot photos. He’ll be able to take UFO pictures instead.

As it turns out, the aliens chose this weekend to reappear and they are making no secret of it. There is even a War of the Worlds-looking tentacle ship hovering above their lake. However, it is probably not there for them. The twitchy former astronaut-abductee squatting in a nearby hunting cabin is more likely the one they are after. However, “the Hunter” is ready to take the fight to them. He might even help the obnoxious kids survive, just to spite the aliens.

The only reason to watch Recall is to take a gander at the crazy act Wesley Snipes perfected, presumably to safely survive his stint in Federal prison. As the Hunter, he is quite an impressive anti-social mess, but he still has the action chops. If the film were told from his POV, it would have been exponentially more interesting. Instead, we get the tedious manipulation of Charlie’s dead girlfriend (you can already guess what happened to her, right?) and slimy Rob’s ridiculously misplaced alpha male aggression.

In some markets, Recall is screening in the Barco Escape format, which utilizes three-screen projection techniques, sort of like Cinerama or the “Triptych” finale in Abel Gance’s 1927 silent masterpiece, Napoleon. Yet, this is such a derivative narrative, featuring such blockheaded characters, you would hardly want to immerse yourself in its world. It is nice to know Snipes can still mix it up, but his efforts are wasted in this parade of alien abduction clichés Not recommended, The Recall is currently playing in New York at the Village East.

Scare-a-Con ’16: The Dark Tapes

The original Blair Witch ushered in the found footage phenomenon in 1999 and just when it looked like the sequel-reboot would finally kill off the sub-genre in 2016, an inventive anthology comes along to give it a new lease on life. Of course, the unspoken question surrounding found footage is how it was found. That will definitely be a cause for concern in the wrap-around segments of Michael McQuown’s The Dark Tapes (trailer here)—note the “To Catch a Demon” segment is directed by SFX artist Vincent J. Guastini, to make billing more complicated—which screens this Friday during the Scare-a-Con Film Festival.

In fact, Guastini’s “Demon” and McQuown’s framing sequences are actually part of the same overall narrative. As the film opens, some hipsters find some pretty darned dark tapes, or rather a video camera, outside a theater of some kind. It seems a physicist, his graduate advisee, and a camera guy were conducting sleep experiments hoping to document the existence of the demonic figures seen by those who experience so-called sleep paralysis. Needless to say, they are too successful. However, before their study collapses into bedlam, McQuown and Guastini give viewers some eerily convincing pseudo-science to explain the horrors we are about to see.

Despite its connection to the connective sequences, “Demon” is the second full segment that unspools in DT. The first is arguably the creepiest. In “The Hunters & the Hunted” an attractive young couple finds their new luxurious house in the Hollywood Hills is haunted by a malevolent entity. The distressed Karen and David duly enlist the help of a gung-ho ghost hunting team, but McQuown has a sinister surprise in store for them that will catch all but the most suspicious viewers completely flat-footed. As the new tenants, Shawn Lockie and Stephen Zimpel really make it work.

The third discrete narrative, “Cam Girls” is by far the weakest. Recorded entirely as skype and webcam sessions, much like the Swanberg installment of the original V/H/S, it shows us what a new web chat recruit and her lesbian lover do with and to their customers during her blackouts.

Happily, DT rebounds in a big way with the closer, “Amanda’s Revenge.” Much to her platonic best friend’s distress, the titular Amanda is rufied at their graduation party, but for her, it is not so unlike her regular experiences as an alien abductee. For some reason, she has taken her mother’s place a victim of choice. However, she intends to fight back in ways that circumvent their control over electronic devices. There have been too many poor to middling alien abduction films (looking at you Ejecta and Hanger 10), but Amanda’s cleverness and resiliency are enormously refreshing. Arguably, that makes two sub-genres redeemed by DT.

As a screenwriter, McQuown throws some wicked twists at viewers, while Guastini’s practical effects give them the old school, tactile feeling fans will appreciate. Evidently, there was some gold left to be mined from the found footage vein after all. Highly recommended for horror fans, The Dark Tapes screens this Friday (9/30), during Scare-a-Con at the Turning Stone Casino in Verona, New York.

Ejecta: Assume the Probing Position

If aliens ever arrive on earth, all those broadcasts we have been beaming into space could be a problem for us. They will either expect we will jump to all sorts of awkward assumptions about probing or will worry we might start vivisecting them in an underground bunker. This film certainly will not help. William Cassidy has lived with a painful implant for years. It has turned him into a half-mad shell of a man, but that will not stop the military from torturing him anyway in Chad Archibald & Matt Wiele’s Ejecta (trailer here), which opens late night tonight in New York at the IFC Center.

Among UFO geeks, Cassidy is a near legendary figure. He is not exactly a reliable witness, but he creeps out everyone who meets him. The long term pain and side effects from his prolonged alien contact, dating back forty years, has completely chopped and diced his psyche. Although he no longer remembers doing so, he granted UFO-chasing filmmaker Joe Sullivan (sadly not the Chicago piano player who gigged with Eddie Condon) access to his spectacularly miserable life.

Sullivan picked a fine time to start documenting Cassidy. In addition to the aliens, Dr. Tobin, a civilian scientist working with the military also wants a piece of him. She thinks he can tell her when the invasion or whatever will start. For some strange reason, Cassidy is not inclined to be helpful, so she goes medieval on him, using some special confiscated alien technology. Yet, that implant might help keep his brain from totally liquefying.

Julian Richings racked up the awards on the genre festival circuit for playing the tortured (literally and figuratively) Cassidy—and not without reason. He goes all in, freaking out one minute, gaunt and withdrawn the next, without lurching ridiculously over the top, like an alien-abducted Meryl Streep. However, he is about the only thing going for this film.

Frankly, Ejecta is littered with plot holes that are only made more conspicuous by the film’s fractured chronology. There is really no logic to the confrontations between Cassidy and Tobin, beyond a desire to make heavy-handed commentaries about “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Lisa House’s Tobin is a ridiculous caricature of sadist villainy, who just becomes embarrassing as the film wears on. It is even difficult to follow the on-screen action when the film combines the worst of shaky campaign and 1980s-style gauzy, neon cinematography, in the dubious tradition of Alien from L.A.

Throughout Ejecta, Richings truly looks like his head might explode, which is not nothing. Nevertheless, the alien invasion-conspiracy business is nothing you haven’t seen done better any number of times. Not recommended, Ejecta screens just before midnights tonight and tomorrow (2/27 & 2/28) in New York, at the IFC Center.