Some people's low rating of this movie is a bit too harsh. It only had a $3 million budget, so obviously they had to spread it as thinly as possible.The acting isn't too bad either and the ending was actually good. A nice reference to the X-Files.

I'm a highly skeptical horror and science fiction fan (as two separate genres). I've seen a ton of them and a shockingly high proportion of them are utter failures and disappointments. So I went in with the lowest expectations. And by god it did not fail me. This was by no means the worst film I've seen but it was one of the biggest MEHs.At the beginning it was average until the sheriff asks the girl "who did this to you?" and she answers "who do you think!" Then there was the point when Lex gets out of the car and just stands there when all her horrified friends are screaming for her to save herself and get back in the car. From then on it was nothing more than a horrific nosedive straight down.I'm not going to go into the bad acting, plot holes, horrible dialogue, etc. There are enough reviews on here doing that. But what I will say is this: unless you are one of those movie-goers with a voracious appetite for everything sci-fi/horror, or both regardless of whether it's good or bad, take a hard pass on this on this one. There are other films out there worthy of your time and money.

So here we have another cabin in the woods story with a group of red- shirt young people, and as always their justification for being there is tenuous. Evidently, the cabin was the vacation home for April and her family. Now her family has fallen apart her mother has conned her daughter into going to the cabin to take a few pictures of the shack so she can sell it; apparently, real-estate agents charge the earth for this service. From the first night, the stereotypical group of friends encounter a series of strange and scary events.So this sounds very familiar... and it is, though it does have some pretty good points... in the beginning at least. I loved the opening sequence which is Bill and Ted's Nightmare. The thing which surprised me most was how good Gil Bellows is as Sheriff Murphy, the scene when he pulls the "let's go die'ers" over was one of my favourite scene's and Bellows is very believable, I wouldn't cross the Sheriff.Then when Michael Ironside appears I was already enjoying the film and was looking forward to seeing how it would progress...Down the toilet... with a double flush!Ironside and Bellows aren't in the movie anywhere near long enough, and though the rest of the cast are okay it's their storyline which lets the film down. Brittany Allan and Freddie Storma aren't too bad as the lovers, April and Kyle, though they're going through a rough patch. Melanie, played by Melanie Papalia, is such a bland throwaway character that if she stood in one place for too long she'd just fade away. Then there's Seth who's portrayed by Jesse Moss; too well if truth be told, as the character is unlikeable and you wonder how anybody could actually be his friend... Oh, I nearly forgot Lex, Anja Savcic, who is Seth's eye-candy "blonde", at the moment, girlfriend - guess who goes first...The story starts it's slide into the pan when Travis (Ironside) recounts to the red-shirts that the human race knows about the existence of aliens and it's excepted that if we don't mess with them then they won't do anything too bad to us... Okay! Unfortunately, April has killed one of them and this action has put her friends on their hit-list.Though most of the movie is pretty unoriginal, there are some good scenes like the opening and the one where Murphy comes across a taped abduction and when he gets mind-melded. The special effects are above average too - the guy's even built a wrecked UFO, though when you see the size of the greys you do wonder how they ever fitted inside. My favourite effect is the tractor beam... I wanna go!Though it's the ending that really kills the film. For some strange reason writer and director Colin Minihan, along with writer Stuart Ortiz (under the pseudonym The Vicious Brothers) opt for an over-the-top unbelievable schmaltzy ending. Though Minihan is capable of filming nicely stylised shots, with some interesting angles, he's not too great at handling emotion. The penultimate climax is risible and instead of making me think, NO! you can't do that!, it had me giggling... and cringing... And the homage to the X-Files is more of an Oh No! than a Cool! moment. However, he nearly makes up for it with the beautifully filmed climax, the effects and cuts are seamless, I skipped back a few times just to watch that scene over again.If the Vicious Brothers had risked it all to give the audience a fresh approach to the "Cabin In The Woods" sub-genre with some original characters and a more realistic outcome, as well as filling in some gaping holes in the story, then this could have been a brilliant movie. Shame.I would recommend it for the reasons I've stated above as they just outweigh the negative elements, though I would say rent it before you consider buying... and only rent when it's cheap.

The best way to get anything out of Extraterrestrial is to watch the first 10 minutes and the last 40 minutes and so treat it as a solid X Files episode, because it sadly does not work as a full-length feature. While the alien action is sound enough (although it breaks no new ground), the film just does not hang together due to stilted scenes that often run on too long (including one or two botched 'jump scares'), and it is somewhat ironic that the Vicious Brothers were not vicious enough in the editing suite. Consequently, if the directors had pared the film down to around 80 minutes then it would work well. As it is, however, the tale loses momentum badly in the middle with the inclusion of a number of static and visually incoherent scenes, and the use of the always-watchable Michael Ironside handily revealing the alien plot to keep things moving and deal with any questions as to the purpose of the aliens (who are indeed plural, so surely the title of the film should be Extraterrestrials?). However, the last 40-30 minutes do go some way to redeeming the film, and while sci-fi clichés abound (although I suspect that they are conscious science fiction homages), the ending is satisfying (with a rather good intertextual link to a certain iconic TV show).