Alien Apocalypse (2005)
(On DVD, May 2006) The Sci-Fi channel is now infamous for producing trash films that only serve to hook the dumbest members of its audience, and if Alien Apocalypse isn’t quite the worst film I’ve ever seen, it does make Battlefield Earth look good… and I write this knowing fully well the repercussions of admitting such a thing. Bad movies are usually exasperating, but Alien Apocalypse quickly reaches a level of apathy that is only reserved for those stuck watching kiddie TV shows over and over again. To put it bluntly, Alien Apocalypse seems written for dumb twelve years olds by an even dumber sixteen-year-old. The tired shtick of the premise (Astronauts come back to Earth to discover that humanity is enslaved by aliens: they teach everyone to fight back) wouldn’t have be publishable for the past forty years in the lit-SF world, but the treatment is even less imaginative than the premise. Even lead actor Bruce Campbell can’t salvage this piece of trash (though he does get a fun drunken monologue and one Ash-worthy line of dialogue: “Your stupidity is terminal. And now you’re cured.”), which get progressively less pleasant as it advances. You will stop caring a lot sooner than the film finishes, leaving the rest of the experience as a grating sensation of losing brain cells to the burning stupidity of the film. Not a pleasant experience; celebrate every day in which you don’t get to see Alien Apocalypse.