Turd-o-meter

Occasionally a film is just so retchingly bad that I could almost long for a world in which it is permitted to track down & kill talentless yobs, in order to be absolutely certain they never strike again.

Alien Visitor; aka, Epsilon (1997), an Australian production, is an amateurish essay posing as science fiction in order trick people into listening to the dull opinions of an immature mind for an hour & a half.

It's like being trapped in a corner by a borish drunk at a party, an overbearing dufus with too many lame opinions & insufficient wit or intellect even when sober.

But this particular party-drunkard, discovering that nobody is any longer listening, began pretending to be a screenwriter & director in order to speak through the mouth of a character as fake & fatuous as himself, purporting to be more intelligent than the human race.

A nameless woman (Ullie Birve) from the star Epsilon materializes on Earth by accident not knowing where she is or how she got there though coming ready-made with the English language replete with heavy Aussy accent.

She encounters a nameless guy (Syd Brisbane) camping in the outback & spends the rest of the film with him in a mutual fit of diarrhea of the mouth. At one point he goes into the bush to hunt food & comes back with a Grade AA domestic white chicken egg, which is as exciting as it's going to get.

She despises earthling's unintelligence & destructiveness, but that doesn't keep her from wanting to screw one of them, which could provide a new perspective on Jane Goodall among the chimps.

She has the power to distort time, time-travel, & teleport, which permits minimalist FX to occur now & then as the characters keep bleating out their pathetically adolescent philosophies.

Beyond the plethora of borish opinions of humanity, nothing much actually happens. Most of the time the two jabbering characters are just walking & talking, sitting & talking, eating & talking, laying down & talking, without actually saying anything consequential, & with no story ever developing out of all that maximumly worthless jabberiness.

The only thing the least bit intriguing is how someone with such a tin ear for dialogue could make a movie with nothing but dialogue, or how a person without a single opinion worth sharing could be so egotistical as to make a thief's claim on a patch of filmlovers' lives.

The title-change in belatedly bringing out this to dvd was probably an attempt to salvage some rentals after the film's long-delayed release. Even director Rolfe de Heer must've realized something had gone seriously awry, for after the film had an unsuccessful showing at Cannes, he hurried home & completely reshot key scenes. It doesn't seem to have helped.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl