What sort of Frankenstein’s Monster did I just watch?
Alien Hunter is a 2003 sci fi flick starring James Spader (Stargate, Secretary). It’s an American/Bulgarian co-production directed by Ronald Knauss, who last directed the Christian propaganda film Gimme Shelter in 2013.
The plot? The film starts off with a scene of a radio dude and his dog intercepting some sort of signal in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Something happens when he finds a crash site, but we don’t get to see what. Suddenly, it’s modern day, and James Spader is lecturing at a university about linguistics while flirting with a female student. He gets called to the Dean’s office, who tells him about a weird signal picked up by a research station in Antarctica. Not only does this part of the plot rip off the 1982 John Carpenter classic The Thing, but this flick actually recycles footage from Carpenter’s film! As James Spader looks at photographs from Antarctica, the film dissolves into the silent footage from the Norwegian camp discovering The Thing’s spaceship in the ice. Not an homage, but the exact same footage! Knauss learned his technique by working in the art department of Roger Corman, who occasionally recycled footage from one project to another. But The Thing doesn’t belong to either of them, and it wouldn’t have been too difficult to produce their own similar footage.
Anyway, Spader flies to Antarctica just in time for the ice to melt and reveal an alien escape pod. The scientists start cutting into the pod, and are successful just as Spader deciphers the signal, which literally says, “Do Not Open”. Wow, the timing astounds me. As soon as the pod is opened, an airbourne virus pops out and instantly melts 3 or 4 people, but leaves everyone else fine. Apparently, the rest of them are carriers, and the world will be destroyed if they ever leave the base. The President and the military back home have somehow figured this out, despite being unable to contact the research facility, and decide to nuke the base. A couple dudes panic, kill some other dudes, then one guy explodes when he goes outside and there is an alien ship hovering over the base. Spader…does not explode. He somehow figures out that if he breathes slowly, he won’t explode. Sorry, what? The four remaining personnel are then “beamed” aboard the alien spaceship and taken away from Earth, just as the nuke vaporizes the base.
Ooh, I forgot about the alien! Yes, there is an alien alive in the pod. He wakes up after they cut into it. He looks suspiciously like the crew stole one of the alien costumes from Independence Day (and it certainly wouldn’t shock me if they had). He tries to communicate hippie space shit to Spader, but then gets shot to death. End of alien. The aliens who arrive in the spaceship at the end of the film appear to be the same species, but it’s hard to tell, as they are only seen in glowing, swirling energy goo.
That’s it. That’s the whole movie. I’ve no idea why they made an effort to incorporate The Roswell Incident from 1947. It doesn’t make any sense, and it isn’t referenced in any meaningful capacity at any point later. I don’t understand why the aliens keep landing, despite apparently carrying a plague so deadly to humans it melts 40% of us on immediate contact. I don’t understand why the aliens scoop up 4 of the humans at the end, but vaporize the 5th, just because he was scared to death. “I don’t understand” sums up a lot of this movie.
Meager effects and stolen valor, plus a couple hot chicks and James Spader, mixed on high with a script written on an Etch-a-Sketch by a monkey on acid. Welcome to Alien Hunter.
