hyped garbage

Fresh and Exciting

As Good As It Gets

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I saw "Manos, the Hands of Fate" and lived to tell the mediocre tale; I also saw daylight the other-side of "The Lucifer Project" and "Doomsday Weapon", and so I reckon I know a stinker when I smell one, but I can say with confidence, that "The Alpha Incident" is not the proverbial turkey it's often branded. Bill Rebane's reputation precedes him, but occasionally he does get it right, so credit where it's due, "Alpha" is a moody, atmospheric and suspenseful if somewhat talky thriller about a Martian virus that has potentially infected a small group of mostly bystanders at a remote railway station, forcing them into quarantine under the watchful eye of Government bio-chemist Stafford Morgan, himself also in containment maintaining contact with the outside world via telephone as he awaits news of a much-anticipated antidote.While it's limited in action, it's not as benign as some other reviews might suggest, with a clever plot twist significantly ratcheting up the tension as the desperate group learn they must not fall asleep, lest a fate worse than death awaits. The performances from Morgan, Goff and Newell in particular are actually very watchable, not over-wrought and certainly not amateur fodder. Star-billed Meeker might be the biggest name on-hand as the meek railroad pen-pusher, but Morgan is clearly the lead and his reliable presence underlines why he was such a prolific actor in the 1970's and 1980's. There's plenty of sympathy for each of the characters (which are mostly clichés), none moreso than Newell's small-town nubile "Jenny", watching her potential evaporate under the prying scrutiny of small-town rednecks looking for tail to taint. Rebane-regular Paul Bentzen and dependable supporting actor John Alderman play the scientists desperately trying to develop an antidote before our stricken survivors submit to eternal slumber, with the prospect of failure looming large as the tone becomes more sombre....While not entirely absent here, Rebane's hard-earned reputation as a plodding film-maker, substituting reams of dialogue for the action a micro-budget can't afford, his narrative is relatively taut and the tension and pathos he builds, quite effective. And if you do persist, you will be rewarded with some cheap (but effective) special effects that won't soon be forgotten - a little bonus material for those who persevere. It's not a great movie, but it's a lot better than its reputation implies and well worth watching.

You have some bad movies and then you also have some REALLY bad movies. And my, oh my, is this movie bad.I really am not a person that calls every bad movie awful or laugh at- or make fun of these sort of movies. I respect movies and the film-making process too much for that but let me tell you, some movies are even too much for me to take. I couldn't believe the stuff this movie was doing, which was absolutely nothing! This is one of those movies that got shot without a real budget behind it, which means that the movie can do very little else than letting a bunch of people sit around in a room and talk to each other, for almost the movie its entire duration. This would had been fine, if any of the characters were any interesting, or had some depth to them. Or if any of the dialog was any good and there was some real tension throughout the entire movie. Really none of this was the case however!The story and the dialog are both awful! The premise is really ridicules and flawed and doesn't ever has enough suspense to it. I can see what this movie was trying to do still. It was trying to be a "The Andromeda Strain" like movie, in which a virus from Mars(!) got accidentally released on a bunch of folks at a railroad station, who have to remain in quarantine at the station because of that. For some odd reason they also shouldn't fall asleep, or else their head will explode. No, I'm not making this up, this is really the entire story of this movie. But instead of trying to be busy with finding a solution or any good ways to stay awake, they talk about- and do absolutely nothing.All of the movie its scenes are extremely stretched out and they just go on and on, with its awful dialog. Half way through I was really starting to get worried about it whether I could finish watching this movie or not, since it starting to become true endurance test for me. The movie is really literally starting to go nowhere after a while and remains stuck in first gear, right till its very end.It really gets made all the more worse by its incompetent people, both in front and behind the camera. It's an awfully bad looking movie, with cheap sets and bad camera-work but what is still the most annoying are its horrible actors. Really not a single person in this movie is likable enough and because of both their horrible personalities and actors portraying them, the characters all work out horribly.This is truly a movie that started out as a bad one already but rapidly started to become an even more and more worse one for me.2/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

For many years my connection to THE ALPHA INCIDENT was a long 35mm trailer that became a cult sensation amongst my pals, mostly for its perceived ineptness and terrible one-liners from the preview. The trailer itself is pretty inept, stopping almost dead half way thru for a long ticker-tape crawl that spells "until" as "untill"! Then a friend sent me a VHS of the film, only to discover that it was missing the first entire reel, highlighting and multiplying the absurdity (not that it made much difference). To me, more than the marginal acting and unreal situations and behavior, the thing it has going for it is really badly written and the dialog is delivered exceedingly poorly. The trailer has ten great/really BAD lines that deserve to be in its IMDb listing. Maybe this film was directed by passers by, but it is one of those films whose badness doesn't destroy its entertainment value..

When I say I really related to this film, I mean by I felt how the characters did about 50 min in, bored. I was utterly pulling my brains out, just like the one, ONE gore scene in the whole film. Watching it reminded me of "George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead" upon reaming other people's responses to the film I see it is a common noticeable. Unlike most films depicting a group of people stuck in a room together there is no developing plot. There is little action/twists in the story. None of the characters appealed to me since they all seemed to have the intelligence of 10 year olds. The Story is simple a man decides to take a look at some crates he has no business looking into but does so, getting his dumb ass infected. Once the owner of the boxes finds out he quarantines himself and 4 other people possibly infected. Although he is the only guard the other members have many chances to escape, it's so not realistic it can't even work in this style of film. I was only entertained for a couple scenes in the film, one in particular is the death scene of a character from the virus. At first it's disappointing but then escalates to a great gore scene. Still this doesn't make up for all the other errors in the film. 2/10