John’s Horror Corner: Alien Predators (1985), a gooey alien infection movie that’s good for a few laughs.
MY CALL: A fun, gory, low budget and laughable horror flick that you’ve probably never heard of. I don’t know about you, but this is exactly what I’m always looking for…long-forgotten 80s horror. IF YOU LIKE THIS WATCH: The Kindred (1987), The Bay (2012) and Xtro (1983) are a few gory, mutant infestation-y movies that I’d endorse. ALTERNATIVE TITLE: The Falling. AVAILABILITY: This movie has not yet made it to DVD that I am aware. This flick is so unknown that the only image I could find for the movie online was the movie poster, which doesn’t even match the cover of my homemade DVD cover for the movie under the other title.
In the early 1970s NASA was evidently doing some experiments in a space lab that “could not be done on Earth.” Then, that space lab crashed in Spain. Despite the setting, this is just a typical American horror flick that has a few people with accents and an Old World town.
Samantha, Damon (Dennis Christopher; Stephen King’s It, Necronomicon: Book of the Dead) and Michael are RV-ing across Spain and they discover that strange things are happening in Duarte. The town is shockingly empty, the locals are behaving strangely and they encounter the weirdest, evil, red-headed, pod person-Cher waitress ever.
As this–we’ll call it a plot–endures, we learn that the Apollo 14 moon mission recovered dormant lifeforms. Nothing as zany as the rock spiders from Apollo 18 (2011), but pretty heinous. A NASA scientist, who behaves a lot like a criminal, provides all of the unsensationally ho-hum revelations of the plot. Basically, the research station crashed, alien life contaminated and mutated the local fauna and people, and they need go to a NASA facility that’s in the basement of a Spanish stronghold tat’s hundreds of years old in order to get some canister so they can create an antidote to the mutagenic alien DNA.
They really put some effort in the writing for our three protagonists. The dialogue between these three doesn’t feel nearly as stiff as the standard 80s ilk. Although, all of the other dialogue and acting is awful.
The gore is strong from the get-go. Loads of guts, little slimy monsters, pulsating and erupting mutations…also, I’ve never seen a dog get dragged inside of the disemboweled body of an alien-infected bull. Very cool.
This movie was really quite fun for some random flick I never heard of–(I picked it up at a convention horror booth). I’d retitle this movie The Trouble with Flesh-Eating Tribbles.
Well thank you so much! Thank you dad for me, too. And may I say how happy I am to find your posted comment on one of my reviews of a more obscure, rather time-forgotten movie.