Alien Terror
1980, Italy, Directed by Ciro Ippolito
Colour, Running Time: 92 minutes
VHS, PAL, VTC, Video: 1.66:1 (and 1.33:1), Audio: Mono
A young girl goes wandering across the beach during a family holiday and foolishly attempts to satisfy piqued curiosity upon discovering some kind of pulsating ‘blob’. A short while later, after heading off to look for her, the mother is somewhat distraught to find the daughter whimpering with half of her face missing. Elsewhere a party of initially intrepid cave explorers is preparing for a mission to descend into a vast array of dangerous underground caverns when one of their number discovers a scattering of unusual rocks - he decides to keep one of them. Once beneath ground, and separated from the rest of mankind, not only do they become hopelessly lost but it’s not long before the rock turns out to be something of extraterrestrial origin and people start disappearing as they realise that there’s something inhuman down there with them, something decidedly alien, hostile, and unsympathetic towards human survival.
Long before The Descent there was Alien Terror. Okay, they’re not identical twins (and fans of the former may consider the latter to simply be low budget trash) but neither are they a million miles apart. The original Italian title (Alien 2 Sulla Terra) would suggest a sly attempt to cash in on Alien. Plot is as straightforward as it gets: group of people explore caves and die one by one at the hands of an unearthly terror. Therein partly lies the problem - much of the first hour fundamentally focuses on the party endlessly meandering the admittedly striking caverns (these are no sets!) and it can drag a little. If you’re in the right mood it does have a fair amount of atmosphere (the quirky but typically Italian score sometimes adding to this) and there have been occasions when I’ve enjoyed this slow moving film. Aside from a fun appearance by the omnipresent Michele Soavi, there are a number of pretty bloody deaths punctuating the endless searching of underground passages but one thing that the film-makers seemed to have tapped into is the potential claustrophobic terror of being lost in a subterranean world, monstrous being in pursuit or no monstrous being in pursuit - when they realise they’re hopelessly lost there is a creeping feeling of genuine fear that the viewer can possibly identify with on a pure instinctive level (and surely that’s where fear itself largely has its roots?), even after never having been lost beneath the earth‘s surface for oneself! Where the boredom is really put to sleep, however, is when one of the characters finally manages to break free, only to find a deserted city above ground suggesting that the extraterrestrial threat has infiltrated Earth on a much more catastrophic level. It’s quite potent and almost epic, but the film unfortunately fails to take it much further, this perhaps being a remnant of films such as Zombi 2, where the world is on the verge of the apocalypse just before the end credits interrupt. Nevertheless, it prevents Alien Terror being simply consignable to the dustbin.
Seems like an almost lost film in the digital age. I picked this up years ago on the old VTC cassette - once available separately, it’s smartly paired up here with the classic (depending on your view…) Nightmare City, making a cool double bill. It’s a large and chunky video box with OTT artwork emblazoned across the cover, and something I don’t particularly want to get rid of for the sheer thrill of owning something pretty rare. In addition, for the VHS format, both films actually look surprisingly clean and detailed, especially considering this tape is a quarter of a century old. While NC is definitely censored, AT is possibly uncut (though I can‘t be certain). One strange thing about the aspect ratio on AT: there is stock footage used throughout the earlier half of the film, kind of in the fashion of Ed Wood Jnr., but while the movie itself is letterboxed at about 1.66:1, the stock material is pillarboxed fullscreen - this strikes me as quite odd. Anyway, while the film can be quite boring it does have its merits and the VTC cassette is nice to own, particularly when AT can’t be found on DVD.