In 1965, US Air Force Captain Jack Grayson & his squadron are flying over the Bermuda Triangle when they encounter a massive alien spaceship. They engage the craft but Grayson is shot down. In the present day, the wreckage of Grayson's plane is found & shipped back home. When his son, Dallas, who is a Naval Commander with duties in Intelligence, tries to visit the wreckage, he is denied entry by Colonel Rosewater, a covert ops soldier. But somehow a pair of UFO nuts steal the truck containing the find & attempt to escape. They are killed by Rosewater & Dallas narrowly saves his father's plane from destruction. Back home, his cancer-stricken daughter Lisa is being visited by a mysterious alien woman who has been treating her illness & training her how to use her genetic ability to teleport objects across vast distances. Dallas is unaware of this but when Rosewater & his goons snatch Lisa & nearly kill him, Dallas is contacted by the woman. Calling herself Angel, she reveals herself to be an alien operative who has watched over the family for generations. Together they attempt to rescue Lisa from the Black Ops team that took her, as well as trying to stop Rosewater & his army of assassins from killing them in the process.Richard Pepin & Joseph Merhi formed PM Entertainment in the early 1990s. First an independent production company with little stature despite Merhi's previous experience as a low-budget action director with films like The Glass Jungle, they had an unexpected success when one of their ultra-cheap action thrillers, CIA: Codename Alexa, became a surprise hit on cable TV when one of its stars, O.J. Simpson, was put on trial in the now legendary murders of his wife & her lover. The film's notoriety, plus the cult success of Pepin's own directorial effort, the Terminator templater CYBER TRACKER, put PM on the map & gave them the ability to turn PM into the major player of the DTV action market in the 1990s.In addition to producing all of their studio's films, Pepin & Merhi took a tag team approach to directing as well. They picked some films & split the workload between themselves, with Merhi directing some action films while Pepin would handle the sci-fi themed ones. Pepin's films in particular would become minor cult classics due to their love of massive shootouts, brutal action sequences & in particular the "Pepin flip" where a vehicle would smash into another vehicle, fly over it & flip over in mid-flight while the impacted vehicle would explode in a massive fireball (The Sender has two of these).As for The Sender, Pepin has been starting to wind down the care that he had given his earlier films & quality has started to slide. The action scenes in The Sender are not as spectacular as previous Pepin films & are not as brutal either. But Pepin has compensated somewhat by adding more dialogue. This would not have been bad if the story was fully fleshed out instead of being haphazardly plotted – there is no sense to the various covert ops teams working on secret projects, UFO sightings, the apparently genetically obtained ability of Michael Madsen's young daughter to teleport objects across vast distances or even the involvement of the ethereal female alien who can shapeshift & also teleport but not as well as her human friend. And almost no mention or even exposition relating the UFO nuts who break into the hangar & steal the plane wreckage (or at least attempt to). The result is a B-grade genre actioner that has some reasonable action scenes & okay effects but a badly-written script & poor plotting. And the sudden return of Madsen's father at the end as a sort of happy ending is kind of stupid.

THE SENDER is a cheesy and unintentionally funny late '90s sci-fi thriller, clearly made to tap into the success of THE X-FILES around that time. Hell, it even has Steven Williams ('Mr. X' from the show) present, complete with ridiculously dyed white hair.Sadly this is a goofy messy of a movie, only worth watching to laugh at. Michael Madsen continues a trend of appearing in cheap B-movie action flicks and gives what can only be termed a wooden performance. There are some surprising faces in support, including Robert Vaughn and R. Lee Ermey, but it's no surprise that the characters they're playing are so stereotyped.THE SENDER adopts an action template throughout, with lots of senseless shoot-outs and some ridiculous vehicle chases to enjoy. Also, you can play 'spot Madsen's stuntman' throughout. Worst of all is the female alien, who turns up wearing a silver lame dress and glitter wig. At this point, you just know you're not going to be able to take this film seriously anymore.

A fighter pilot is shot down. Decades later, his son is military himself, and has a daughter. The girl is kidnapped for scientific reasons, and it's up to Madsen(who squints and badasses his way through this… it's hilarious to see him act completely cool and smooth even in the face of contact with extraterrestrials) and an alien who has kept a watch on the family(and chooses to come to us in the form of a *really* hot chick, with amazing legs, in tight silver latex… and even though she doesn't stay in that for all that long, we straight men of Earth thank her and her kind a lot for that) to get her back. This has pretty reasonable performances, and other than Michael, we also get R. Lee Ermey being his usual self(and when is that ever a negative?) and Robert Vaughn appears in a role that is important, if not afforded an awful lot of screen-time. The film is basically an action flick with some sci-fi aspects, and as far as that goes, it's decent. We get chases, particularly vehicular ones(several cars go flying in this), shootouts and occasional physical fighting. This is quite funny a couple of times, and we are surprisingly mostly spared the "what, you mean something here, in this place that I'm not familiar with, is different from what I'm used to" punchlines. It's 91 minutes sans credits, and it's somewhat entertaining. The FX are OK. Actually, they're better than in other of these low-budget ones… but let's return to The Sender(sorry, it was too good, had to do it). There is violence and disturbing content in this. I recommend this to fans of the genre, as long as you don't expect too much, and accept it for what it is. 6/10

"Hey, I just learned my daughter isn't going to die like I thought... whatever.. let's go home" "Hey, some chick just removed three bullets from my chest and saved my life, but they took my daughter... whatever.. she's hot... what bomb? Oh that? whatever..." "Hey look, the car doesn't need to be started, it just runs on it's on... whatever""Hey, this chick is now naked... cool. Alien? OK, whatever.... jeez this sucks." "Hey, look, I just sent two Black Ops dudes through a wall.... twenty minutes ago some UFO geek protester was kicking my ass... cool... whatever. Check out how shiny my classic car is... even in this desert" "Hey, a space ship. That's neat. I wouldn't want to have to go against it. Hey, should I ask about my daughter?" "Hey, we landed too damn far from my daughter... " "Hey, look, we were hit by a shoulder fired rocket, oh well, some spaceship... and look the helicopters that fly what. 120mph max are shooting us in the same spot over and over... oh well. Hey, one of them just took out the side of an office building and crashed. Oh well... when's this fecking movie end?""Hey, check it out, my dad ain't dead after all. Here, go see your grandpa and leave us alone for awhile... I hate kids. How did I get roped into making this piece of sht movie?"