Aliens Vs College Girls (2017)

AKA Aliens Vs Titanic.

There are some movies that overcome their low budgets, ladle on the charm, and make the most of their shortcomings to become something that, while never topping any all-time favourite lists, can become a nice little recommendation to keep up your sleeve when fellow film fans want to find something that hasn't already been given too much exposure.

Aliens Vs College Girls is not one of those movies. Directed by Jeff Leroy, it's a hot mess that tries to throw enough silliness and gratuitous nudity into the first 10 minutes to keep the easily amused viewer attentive for the remainder of the, thankfully short, runtime. The writer is credited as Cameron T. James, which I assume is another "witty" gag, but IMDb has a story credit for Keith Parker so we'll let him share the blame.

The plot, as slight as it is, goes as follows: The spaceship Titan-1C is struck by a space meteor shower, and in the rocks that hit the vessel there are small aliens. It turns out that these aliens can invade hosts and control them, with humans proving to be quite perfect as a potential breeding ground for their kind. A small band of survivors, nominally led by Lana Vickers (Tasha Tacosa), eventually figures this out and tries to survive until the end credits roll.

Don't get excited by the paragraph above. I have inadvertently made the film sound a lot more interesting and exciting than it actually is. After those opening scenes, which at least have Bree Olson cavorting around for a while, it's all downhill. The characters are hard to care about, at all, the film feels padded out throughout most of the middle section, and most of the first third, and a lot of the finale, and there are special effects on display here that fall far below the standard set even by the very first series of Red Dwarf (coming up for thirty years old next year).

Sadly, Jeff Leroy is capable of doing better with this kind of schlock, as he showed when he gave us the enjoyably daft Creepies. If this had some better humour running through a lot of the scenes, if just a little bit of extra time was done to polish the CGI, or if there was a better way to scatter the nudity and sex throughout without it feeling boring then this could have been easy entertainment for whenever you didn't want something that required too much concentration. It ends up being one to completely avoid instead.

2/10.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aliens-vs-College-Girls-DVD/dp/B0717465LD

Creepies (2003)

Anyone familiar with the wonderful comic creation of Garth Marenghi will get a lot of pleasure from this film, especially if you ever saw the TV show "Man To Man With Dean Learner" and laughed your ass off at the clip displayed of "War Of The Wasps", a fictional movie that Garth Marenghi was saddened to never have finished. Creepies IS "War Of The Wasps" but with big spiders instead of wasps. I'm absolutely serious.

Normal spiders can be creepy and horrible so making them big is often an easy way to get some good horror material. Hell, I even enjoyed the laughable Spiders and The Giant Spider Invasion. Creepies is like a combination of those two movies made on a budget of $50 with an assortment of old props the crew salvaged from the set of the Thunderbirds TV show. I remember many years ago when I used to sit up, playing Resident Evil on the PSOne with all of the lights out. Infected dogs jumping through a window made me jump out of my skin but I got REALLY scared when my onscreen character wandered into a room covered in webs. When a large tarantula burst in and I had to defeat it to continue with the game I was genuinely tense. That tarantula, way back in the 32-bit games console era, was scarier than anything seen in Creepies.

But only one of the titles already mentioned features this classic line of dialogue: "Yeah, well, before you pat yourself on the back I remind you that we got a spider the size of J-Lo's ass in Hollywood". Oh yes, Creepies starts off bad and gets worse in a way that leads to comedy greatness. This was the best bad movie that I've seen in some time.

I think many people misunderstand me sometimes. I KNOW how bad this film is, I know that many people would give up on it as a lost cause and I know that it doesn't deserve to sit alongside most of the other movies that it may share shelf space with one day. But I also know that it's bloody hilarious, I know that at least some of the humour is intentional (as long with some references to other movies - also pretty amusing, especially the Jaws moment) and I know that director Jeff Leroy and writer Eric Spudic tried to make up for their lack of budget with enthusiasm and affection. Which, for me, is something deserving a bit of goodwill, even if the movie gets almost everything wrong.

The acting stinks. I apologise is anyone involved reads this (though I seriously doubt that they will) but I think everyone was picked for . . . . . . . . . . . . their cost-effectiveness as opposed to actual acting talent. Though in the case of Ron Jeremy, in the movie for all of a few minutes, it's clear that he was only picked for being Ron Jeremy. Lisa Jay, Jeff Ryan, Phoebe Dollar, Calley Edmunds and everyone else onscreen plays second fiddle to the awful special effects mixing unconvincing rubber spiders with unconvincing special effects.

What more can I say? Do I mention the moment when a couple of people think they're safe from spiders because they've used a ladder to get higher in the building? Or the scene that features a spider communicating to the other spiders and giving orders to destroy humans? If you want some giggles then watch this and enjoy it as I did. If you want realism, however, you may as well opt for A Town Called Panic.

5/10.

http://www.amazon.com/Creepies-Ron-Jeremy/dp/B0009U5FUG/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1402449817&sr=1-1&keywords=creepies