Sort of a poor man's Alien, with an insect-like alien from Mars (or recently hanging out there, if not from there) arriving on Earth with lots of special effects methylcellulose and rather irksome parthenogenesis.While clearly this was movie shot on a budget, they did okay at having lots of nervous military guys running down dark hallways terrified of where the monster might be. In this, it very much used Alien's techniques.I did some eye-rolling at the cliché of the military guy coming in and taking over, at the alien's ability to tap right into earth computers, and so on--but that's nothing worse than you'd see in big-budget s-f movies.What was above average: First, the score, by Kevin Kiner, which elevated the tension levels nicely, and the script detail that we never did know if the alien was evil, invading, nice, curious, lost, confused, or what. You know, if this sort of event did happen, we'd be just as clueless about its intentions.(As it ends up, the biologist could have skipped the appendectomy and stayed part of the main plot.)

Lifeform (AKA Invader) 1996 RThis film is about a team of scientists and military yahoos that end up fighting an alien creature. It's that simple. It's yet another film like Alien or Leviathan (which itself was a direct rip-off of Alien) or Species. In this one, intelligent life that reproduces asexually sends a Viking probe back from Mars (because Mars is new territory in the world of alien encounters you know), and that probe has been modified to carry this creature along with it. Of course, the alien gets out and gets hunted and gets killed. Overall, the acting isn't too bad, and the special effects are competent. The alien is intelligent, so of course, the one woman in the film feels sorry for it. The design of the alien itself is kind of like those half-human, half-horse creatures. You know, a centaur. It looks all terrifying on the outside, but then it extends it's little alien body up (the part where the human part of the centaur goes) out of the normal trunk (the part that is the horse), and it looks all benevolent. The military base they're on is rather bland, and of course, Big Brother shows up and spoils the show. The Army folks saunter about trying to kill the alien and they're all afraid it may have some contagion that it's spreading around.The atmosphere isn't bad, but the film is somewhat shallow—it's just a straight-forward science fiction/horror flick with some decent gore and a humorous kill (guy is stabbed with the blunt end of an M-16). Nothing really special, but nothing really horrible. Recommended to hardcore SF/horror buffs. And that's about it.5/10

"Lifeform" would have been a solid 30- or 60-minute episode of "Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits." It takes the "Alien" theme and throws a few twists in it, such as, do we really know what the alien wants? or is the alien trying to kill us or is it scared and trying to protect itself FROM us? The problem is, it's a full-length feature movie. Thus, we have to sit around and twiddle out thumbs while the director comes up with scene after scene of boring filler. When they're not taking 15 minutes to explain something that should only take 30 seconds, they're giving a young Ryan Phillippe plenty of meaningless face time. The military grunts come across as Keystone Kops quality. If that's our finest, this country is in really sad shape. There are also too few scenes with the alien. A potentially good movie became way too pedestrian. I'm giving this a 3 out of 10.

A mysterious object enters the airspace of a military base in California going at a tremendous rate of speed. A team is sent out to investigate. It turns out to be one of the Viking landers from that we sent to Mars. How did it get back to Earth? Why is it here? Is there a big nasty alien that's going to end up popping out of our chests if we touch it? While the last question is a bit of a joke relating to the obvious Alien (1979) influences on Lifeform (aka Invader), it's no secret that the film involves, well, an alien lifeform. What seems to be more of a secret is the film's existence and the fact that it's pretty good.An obviously low-budget affair, writer/director Mark H. Baker overcomes this limitation with a smart, well-constructed story, plenty of sci-fi horror tension, and fine performances (including from an amusingly young Ryan Phillippe). A lot of the budget appears to have been spent on building the Viking replica, the costumes/military accoutrements for the human cast, the creature costume and special effects. It was money well spent. The effects are amazing for such a low budget film. The creature costume is as good as most big studio efforts, the Alien-style cocoons and eggs are well done, and there is a great, visceral autopsy scene.Except for exterior location, Baker wisely keeps all of the action in a nondescript government facility. "Nondescript" may not sound very attractive visually, but it's believable. That's how government facilities look. Besides, Baker is skilled enough to make it interesting visually. The bulk of the plot is divided into two modes: (1) figuring out what the Viking lander and then the alien are doing there, and (2) "monster" chase and attack scenes.Baker gives us fantastic sci-fi writing for both. We have a team of bright, multi-dimensional scientists examining the lander from a "hard science" angle, with dialogue that's not gobbledy-gook yet that's easy enough to understand. They propose intelligent theories and make intelligent moves. As the military becomes more involved and we begin to enter more of an action/horror sci-fi mode, Baker doesn't have his characters leave their brains at the doors. They develop an Alien-like sulfur detector to find the monster, and they have insights into its behavior that help them.Still, the material is very suspenseful at times, and it is consistently captivating. There are clever subtexts. One is keyed to an important piece of dialogue--"Why are we exploring space if we're just going to blow-up every lifeform we come across?" Even though there is little reason to believe that the alien has ill intentions, most of our protagonists assume that it does, and they all assume that it at least poses a great danger to them in the form of unwittingly transmitted viruses, for example. They go so far as to issue a quarantine and consider drastic worst-case-scenarios and options. Baker seems to have a pessimistic view of human tendencies in the face of the unknown, and probably deservedly so.Although there are some flaws with the film (otherwise I wouldn't have subtracted two points), including strange moves by characters, such as one wearing a face mask to guard against biological contamination and another standing a foot behind and not wearing a face mask, Lifeforce is unusual (such as its strange but refreshing nihilistic ending—apparently, fortuitously precipitated by budget limitations) and well worth watching.